A healthy enthusiasm for danger

Sam Leith SUFFER AND SURVIVE: GAS ATTACKS, MINERS' CANARIES, SPACESUITS AND THE BENDS — THE EXTREME LIFE OF J. S. HALDANE by Martin Goodman Simon & Schuster, £14.99, pp. 422, ISBN 9780743285971 © £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The picture on the dustwrapper of Suffer and Survive shows a gen ial-looking Victorian gent with a serious moustache — and it does not tell a lie. The physiologist J. S. Haldane was genial, serious, and extremely Victorian. He was an obstinate man of principle. He was a rigorous experimentalist with a philosophical bent. He was loyal but somewhat unfortunate in his marriage: Mrs Haldane spoke more of duty than of love, disagreed violently with his rather liberal politics (she was a fierce imperialist, and in favour of concentration camps in the Boer war), and denied him sex, transferring her attentions instead to a green macaw called Polly. He was a kind father (his children were the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane and the writer Naomi Mitchison), a generous colleague, a doting grandfather.

Haldane was prone, too, to bouts of the sort of mild eccentricity one likes to expect from Victorian gentleman scientists — he'd go upstairs to change for supper, for example, and have to be retrieved by his wife having lost the thread halfway through the process of undressing, donning his nightshirt and retiring to bed. But he was also — as Martin Goodman's subtitle hints — a hard-charging inquirer into all corners of his chosen field; above all, the mechanisms of respiration.

Pretty much an invalid for most of his life (he was plagued by lumbago and rheumatic pain, and that's before what he did to his own lungs), Haldane displayed astonishing stamina and personal sacrifice in his work. He experimented often, and punishingly, on himself. He put himself through exercises at immense heights and immense depths (he couldn't swim, but went deep-sea diving in the interests of investigating the bends). He spent most of his working life up mountains, down mines, at the bottom of the sea, wading through sewers or gassing himself in the comfort of his own home.

He survived concentrations of carbon monoxide in the blood that would, as his biographer notes, have looked entirely plausible as the 'cause of death' on a death certificate. `Dry air,' Goodman writes, 'he could withstand to an astounding high of 300°F, though if he moved about too much his hair began to singe.' Working in 99°F 'thy bulb' heat, on one occasion, a colleague gave up after half an hour with a rectal temperature of 102.4°F; Haldane went on for another 30 minutes. He spent hours and hours breathing toxic air and taking careful, methodical notes of its effects. He gassed himself with chlorine, methane, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, pure oxygen, nitrogen, mustard gas and god knows what else in various combinations... you name it, he turned blue and passed out on it. And, typically, no sooner had he come back round than he returned to the chamber to have another go.

This was not all for fun. Haldane had a fierce commitment to the idea of the body as a self-regulating organism — lecturing on Hippocrates, he once said `the body is no mere machine, but a living organism, and... it is of the "nature" of a living organism to cure itself.' He believed — a belief nurtured in the progressive medical academy of Germany — that the parameters of this organism were discoverable by exhaustive experimentation. And he believed that there was no better experimental subject than the scientist himself.

His work achieved a huge amount. He improved the conditions of miners — whether it be by uncovering a bizarre infestation of tropical hookworm in Cornish tin mines, by divining the cause of pneumoconiosis and proposing a solution, or identifying the choking gases that claimed victims after explosions. He designed effective breathing apparatus for rescuers, and the canary as an early warning system was his idea. He even designed a special canary-case with an oxygen cylinder as its handle so the conked-out bird could be revived.

He designed space-suits for aeronauts and looked into altitude sickness. He improved the lot of those imprisoned in concentration camps during the Boer war — not least by denouncing a daft woman who imagined that by substituting jam for the fat ration she'd solve the malnutrition problem.

He did all this, and more, at some personal cost. Echoing the paired terms of his title, Goodman describes him aiming for 'undreamt of heights of discomfort and achievement'. Routinely, the accounts of his experiments involve vomiting, convulsions, trembling, confusion and sometimes memory loss. At one point, experimenting with extremes of low barometric pressure, and after writing 'very wobbly' as a self-assessment on a piece of paper, he stared into a hand-mirror to check himself for the blue lips — cyanosis — that would indicate anoxaemia. He did this for a long time. Turned out he was looking at the back rather than the front of the mirror.

He took, as will by now be evident, a different view of the world from many of his colleagues in the medical profession. 'There are few more contemptible figures in the world than those men who spend all their energies in looking after their own health,' he wrote, adding, 'Those who spend too much of their time in looking after other people's health are apt to be terrible bores.'

He was as good as his word. Though he led from the front, his son Jack was co-opted for the experimental programme at a young age. Discovering a pocket of 'firedamp' or methane in a north Staffordshire pit, J. S. told J. B. S., then six years old, to stand up straight and recite Mark Antony's speech from Julius Caesar. 'Friends, Romans, countrymen ...' the tot began. He got as far as `the noble Brutus' before his legs gave way. Flat on his face on the ground, he was now below the level of the methane, which was lighter than the breathable air. Consciousness returned and, as Goodman notes, lessons had been learnt.

These days, J. S. would be locked up for child abuse. But J. B. S. evidently found it characterbuilding. He retained a healthy enthusiasm for danger, and was years later to write back from the war to announce: 'I am enjoying life here very much. I have got a most ripping job as a bomb officer, teaching bomb-throwing to a number of men... The best people at it seem to be the reckless kind...'

Haldane senior's involvement in the war effort was less front-line than that of his son, but it was vital. As the Germans started experimenting with gas warfare — chlorine at first, and later mustard gas —Haldane led the race to provide effective protection for the troops. (As ever, this involved gassing himself half to death.) Winston Churchill emerges badly from the story, and Haldane very well. Having heard about the gas attacks, Churchill declared blithely: 'Oh, what you want is what we have in the navy. Smoke helmets or smoke pads, and you make them out of cotton wool or something. You'd better get theDaiO, Mail to organ ise the making of a million of them.'

Haldane pointed out that while a pad of cotton wool clamped to the mouth might help a little with smoke inhalation, itwouldn't offer the slightest protection against chlorine gas. Yet not long afterwards Haldane returned from France to discover the Times reporting that the War Office had appealed for donations of home-made gasmasks from cotton wool or 'double stockinette'. Haldane, furious, was reassured that this was merely a propaganda exercise, and that the useless masks wouldn't be dispatched to the Front. Yet, again, not long afterwards 90,000 of them found their way to France — and proved just as much help as Haldane predicted.

Meanwhile, Haldane and his team worked like mad at designing effective respirators, tearing up stockings and shawls and even the young Aldous Huxley's scarf to make facemasks. The one they came up with went into mass production — but not before Haldane had to point out that the reason the women in the factory were getting their fingers burnt and their rubber gloves dissolved was that they were using caustic soda rather than, as prescribed, carbonate of soda. Doh!

Having said, then, that so much in Haldane's story is interesting, it's necessary to report that the telling of it is not always so. This book is, in patches, immensely frustrating and opaque. Goodman hasn't the gift of remembering what the reader needs to know, or of bringing clarity to a scene. Characters are introduced without explanation of who they are (most will know at least vaguely who Joseph Lister was, but T. H. Green surely deserves a gloss); anecdotes are alluded to or truncated; some of Haldane's experiments and discoveries are all but impossible (at least for a non-chemist) to understand. My marginal notes are along the lines of 'What commission?' When?"Said by whom?' Reported where?' What the f*** are phenol and indoxyl?'

Perhaps a more thorough scholarly apparatus would have helped, not least because of Goodman's determination to novelise his narrative. A little creative re-imagining is all very well (Ann Wroe's recent biography of Shelley awards itself, with success, remarkable licence in that direction), but it can make the reader unsure what's fancy and what's fact. 'His memories brought back vivid images of the scenes beneath his feet,' Goodman will write, for example. Has he made this up, you wonder, or was it sourced from a diary or a letter?

And yet, and yet. I register frustration only because, in Haldane, Goodman has hit on a really fascinating subject. Like a literary Haldane, the reader suffers somewhat through the experience — but comes away having learnt something.