Subramanian on JBS Haldane
The full title is Samanth Subramanian, A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J.B.S. Haldane (2020), which I don't think would fit in the subject line box.
This was really quite readable, as far as style went, except that it was oddly organised and the sequence of events was not exactly what one would expect from chapter to chapter.
However, it's focused on Haldane as scientist and his politics and trying to come to terms (which I don't think he manages to do) with how somebody who not only pretty much made a religion of the scientific method and being open about the methodology but also somebody who had been part of the great leap forward made in genetics in the wake of the rediscovery of Mendel, could be so uncritical about Lysenko and Lysenkoism, because he was just that much of a Stalinist.
Partly it looks as though Haldane's contrarian streak kept him in the CPGB and writing for The Daily Worker and at least to appearances a true believer, sufficiently so that there's a massive MI5 file on him, for longer than one might reasonably anticipate. But when one considers the bigger picture of his character, one is very predisposed to think that if he'd been based in the USSR at the same period he'd have been shot or in a gulag in very short order, because authority issues. Not to mention, that dedication to the scientific method.
Kind of avoided psychological delving - does suggest that his war experiences of being a very good killer (having previously been a) a pacifist and b) much of his work having been with his father on life-saving industrial/mining safety research) had some (unexplored in detail) impact.
And while the fact that his father (JS Haldane) took him along on his research expeditions in submarines and down mines and incorporated him from a really young age in the self-experimentation he did is presented as, and he thought that was a jolly adventure - unlike the obvious abuse he experienced at Eton - one does wonder about stuff that was accepted if upper-class scientist did it involving his offspring and what long-term impact it had. Because Haldane seems to have gone on doing dodgy risky self-experimentation all his life and one does wonder a bit how far it was entirely about advancing the frontiers of knowledge and being one's own subject etc.
Totally not enough about his relationship with Naomi Mitchison! - who at one point is recorded as remarking upon the rather deliberate and excessive, even given wartime conditions, discomfort Jack was living in.
It's also (I think) downright evasive about his marriages and sex-life. This is a man who was - presumably in the fine tradition already mentioned of Being a Research Subject - writing to Kinsey in his later years. His side of the correspondence is among the Haldane papers at UCL which Subramanian cops to have consulted in the bibliography.
I find it dubious and even coy to have a footnote apropos Haldane's childlessness (which he was deeply wounded by, especially given his sister's fecundity) in which Subramanian cites his first wife, Charlotte, having claimed he was impotent. I can well believe that after their torrid adulterous love-affair, the scandalous divorce and the problems that caused for his position at Cambridge, when they finally married and he was unable to gratify her desire for motherhood the marriage may well have developed sexual difficulties (Mitchison suggested mumps, his stepson suggested a war-injury, and one considers the amount of exposure to toxic chemicals he'd undergone as causes of sterility). She went on to console herself with toy-boy poets (I once co-reviewed a biography of her which did not make her out a particularly sympathetic character) until they finally divorced and he remarried.
I also came away thinking that only a bloke scientist could have had that kind of a career... an awful lot of offended people and annoyed institutions along the way.
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