Hello you're very welcome to Long Reed's a Jacoban podcast where we look in depth

at political topics and thinkers. My name is Daniel Finn on the features editor here

at Jacobin and I'll be presenting the show.

JBS Haldane was one of the great scientific minds of the 20th century.

He played an important role in the development of genetics and the theory of evolution.

Paul Dane was also a tireless political campaigner who gravitated towards the Communist movement in the 1930s and 40s.

His public career makes for a fascinating case study on the relationship

between politics and science. Our guest today is Samantha Burmanian. He's a journalist from India who's now based in London and the author of several books.

His biography of Haldane, a dominant character, was published in 2019. Before going into the details of his life,

could you give people who might not be familiar at all with JBS Halldane

a brief summary of the position that he occupied in British public life during the middle part of the last century and some of the contributions that he made to the development of science.

Well, Haldane was primarily a geneticist and his career overlapped with the rise of genetics

as a field of study in the first half of the 20th century.

He demonstrated a bunch of things.

He demonstrated the mechanism of genetic linkage in mammals.

So that's the way in which two genes that lie next to each other

on a chromosome tend also to be inherited together.

He mapped the genes for hemophilia and color blindness.

He introduced a theory for how life began on earth.

His most important contribution, I think, was to reconcile two aspects of genetics that in the early part of

the 20th century seemed to be irreconcilable and if that gap had persisted or when the gap was persisting

people really sort of were afraid that Darwin's theory of natural selection was doomed altogether.

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