John Scott Haldane

John Scott Haldane (; 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. 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. Background and family Haldane was born in Edinburgh to Robert Haldane, whose father was Scottish evangelist James Alexander Haldane, and Mary Elizabeth Burdon-Sanderson, daughter of Richard Burdon-Sanderson and the granddaughter of Sir Thomas Burdon. His maternal uncle was the physiologist John Scott Burdon-Sanderson. He was the brother of Elizabeth Haldane, William Haldane and Richard Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane.