John Scott Haldane
John Scott Haldane CH FRS (/ˈhɔːldeɪn/; 2 May 1860 – 14/15 March 1936) was a British physician physiologist and philosopher famous for intrepid self-experimentation which led to many important discoveries about the human body and the nature of gases. He also experimented on his son, the celebrated and polymathic biologist J. B. S. Haldane, even when he was quite young. Haldane locked himself in sealed chambers breathing potentially lethal cocktails of gases while recording their effect on his mind and body.
John Scott Haldane FRS | |
|---|---|
| Born | 2 May 1860 Edinburgh |
| Died | 14 March 1936 (aged 75) Oxford |
| Education | Edinburgh Academy |
| Alma mater | University of Edinburgh Friedrich Schiller University of Jena |
| Known for | Black Veil Respirator Haldane effect Haldane's decompression model |
| Spouse | Louisa Kathleen Coutts Trotter |
| Children | J. B. S. Haldane, Naomi Mitchison |
| Awards | Fellow of the Royal Society, member of the Royal College of Physicians and of the Royal Society of Medicine; many honorary degrees |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Physiology, medicine |
| Institutions | University of Glasgow New College, Oxford University of Birmingham |
Haldane visited the scenes of many mining disasters and investigated their causes. When the Germans used poison gas in World War I, Haldane went to the front at the request of Lord Kitchener and attempted to identify the gases being used. One outcome of this was his invention of a respirator, known as the black veil.
Haldane's investigations into decompression sickness resulted in the concept of staged decompression, and the first reasonably reliable decompression tables, and his mathematical model is still used in highly modified forms for computing decompression schedules.