Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music

when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. Deep inside a staphichie coal mine in 1894, J.S. Haldane fixed his mouth to a pipe that drew gas from a blocked seam and sucked.

Interesting. That taste in the back of the throat smacked of 10% carbonic acid in the air.

He stuck with it for 30 seconds. As he broke off, gasping, his companions cast electric light on his face.

It had turned blue. His cheeks recovered their pinkness, and there he was, his mouth back on the pipe.

He turned blue again.

Fascinating, blue, pink, blue, pink blue.

He kept going back for more.

As J.S. Haldane's biographer, how could I lay claim to that peculiar experience?

Fairly, I can accept that much of a subject's life is beyond my scope.

I needn't wage war to write about a general, or give birth to write about a mother,

or suck down poisonous gas cocktails to write about this scientist. However, one thrill of writing

biography is the chance to step beyond your own era, to break

out of your life and walk around in someone else's.

How close can a biographer get and how safe is it to try?

I knew nothing of Haldane before I started.

I went looking for the world's greatest serial self-experimentor, and J.S. Haldane is the man who emerged.

Why did that particular subject appeal?

I liked the strong narrative options of a man testing his body to its limits.

It would spike a tale with dramatic high points, and a lifelong habit of self-experimentation would spare me the biographer's

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