The unexpected always happens

These days such subject choices, once made, seem irrevocable for students. Not so for one of my son's eminent predecessors, John Burdon Sanderson (J.B.S.) Haldane, who entered the same institution (New College, Oxford) exactly one hundred years before him. Destined to become one of the foremost evolutionary biologists, he began with a mathematics scholarship, and then switched to 'Greats' (Latin and ancient Greek), gaining a first-class degree under the looming shadow of the First World War [1]. Despite this circuitous path, his biological roots had been planted deep, in his relationship with his physiologist father. He first appears in print as last author of a paper in 1912, along with Haldane senior and C.G. Douglas [2], examining the uptake of oxygen and carbon monoxide by haemoglobin; J.B.S. did the maths, and here escaped being an experimental subject, the privilege of blood donation being reserved for the first two authors and a number of anonymous mice. Four years earlier he had already been experimenting in Mendelian genetics, breeding 300 guinea pigs on the lawn of their home with his sister Naomi. They eventually switched to the mouse, and published their study of linkage in 1915 [3].In today's highly regulated world of research ethics and health & safety rules, where even ultrapure water purchased from Sigma carries a hazard warning, these early days seem as exciting as the wild west. Everything was there to be discovered, and self-experimentation was an excellent place to start. In working, with his father, to understand the effects of poison gases and to develop effective respirators, Haldane underwent gassing with chlorine. In experiments involving decompression chambers he suffered crushed vertebrae during a fit, and burst eardrums that, once healed with a hole remaining, left him somewhat deaf but permitted the social accomplishment of blowing tobacco smoke from the ears. In testing the effects of acidification of the blood he drank dilute hydrochlo