Lancelot Hogben

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Lancelot Thomas Hogben
Born(1895-12-09)9 December 1895
Died22 August 1975(1975-08-22) (aged 79)
Wrexham, Wales, United Kingdom
Alma materTrinity College, Cambridge
Occupation(s)experimental zoologist, medical statistician

Lancelot Thomas Hogben

eugenics movement in the middle of his career, and wrote popular books on science, mathematics and language in his later career.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]

Early life and education

Hogben was born and raised in

Tottenham County School in London, his family having moved to Stoke Newington, where his mother had grown up, in 1907, and then as a medical student studied physiology at Trinity College, Cambridge.[3] Hogben had matriculated into the University of London as an external student before he could apply to Cambridge and he graduated as a Bachelor of Science (BSc) in 1914.[9] He took his Cambridge degree in 1915, graduating with an Ordinary BA. He had acquired socialist convictions, changing the name of the university's Fabian Society to Socialist Society and went on to become an active member of the Independent Labour Party. Later in life he preferred to describe himself as 'a scientific humanist'.[10]

In the

Red Cross in France, under the auspices of the Friends' War Victims Relief Service and then the Friends' Ambulance Unit. He then returned to Cambridge, and was imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector in 1916. His health collapsed and he was released in 1917.[1] His brother George was also a conscientious objector, serving with the Friends' Ambulance Unit
.

Career

After a year's convalescence he took lecturing positions in London universities and in 1921 he became a Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) in Zoology of the University of London.

Keith Prize for the period 1933–35.[12] He then went to McGill University
.

In 1927 he became zoology chair at the University of Cape Town. He worked in endocrinology, studying chameleon properties of the Xenopus frog. The frog's adult color depended on its early environment; wild frogs became brownish-green, while frogs raised in a dark environment became black, and in a light environment, light-colored. Hogben theorized that the frog's ability to develop differences in color was related to the pituitary gland. After removing the pituitary gland, the frogs became white regardless of their environment.[13]

The frogs also developed a side effect that Hogben tried to counteract by injecting the frogs with pituitary extract from an

racial policies
drove him to leave.

In 1930 Hogben moved to the London School of Economics, in a chair for social biology. There he continued to develop the Hogben Pregnancy Test. Previous pregnancy tests required several days to carry out and resulted in the deaths of mice or rabbits. Hogben's pregnancy test took hours and could be carried out without harm to the frogs, which could be reused for future tests. It became the major, international pregnancy test for about fifteen years, from the mid-1930s through the 1940s.[14]

The social biology position at the London School of Economics was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and when it withdrew funding Hogben moved to Aberdeen, becoming Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Aberdeen in 1937.

During World War II Hogben had responsibility for the British Army's medical statistics. From 1941–1947 he was Mason Professor of Zoology at the University of Birmingham and professor of medical statistics there 1947–1961, when he retired. In 1963, he became the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Guyana, a post he abandoned in April 1964, resigning in 1965.

Xenopus pregnancy test controversy

Hogben's claim to have discovered the Xenopus pregnancy test was disputed by two South African researchers,

British Medical Journal on 16 November 1946[18] clarified that Hogben was retrospectively wrongly claiming credit for discovering the pregnancy test. Nobel laureate John B. Gurdon of the Wellcome CRC Institute and Nick Hopwood of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, elaborated on this in detail in their comprehensive article published in The International Journal of Developmental Biology, pointing out that although Hogben had demonstrated in principle that Xenopus might be used for testing the presence of gonadotrophins in a pregnant woman's urine, his reporting had not mentioned pregnancy testing at all; he seemed to have had other research directions.[19]

Political views

While he was[

R.A. Fisher
, the leading scientist-eugenicist of the day (Tabery 2008).

In an interview for the book Twentieth Century Authors, Hogben stated:

"I like Scandinavians, skiing, swimming and socialists who realize it is our business to promote social progress by peaceful methods. I dislike football, economists, eugenicists, Fascists, Stalinists, and Scottish conservatives. I think that sex is necessary and bankers are not".[10]

Popular science writing

Inspired by the example of The Outline of History by H. G. Wells, Hogben began to work on books designed to popularize mathematics and science for the general public. Hogben produced two best-selling works of popular science, Mathematics for the Million (1936) and Science for the Citizen (1938). Mathematics for the Million received widespread praise, with H. G. Wells saying that "Mathematics for the Million is a great book, a book of first-class importance".[20] The book was also lauded by Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell and Julian Huxley.[20][21]Mathematics for the Million was reprinted after Hogben's death.[21] While at Aberdeen, Hogben developed an interest in language. Besides editing The Loom of Language by his friend Frederick Bodmer, he created an international language, Interglossa, as 'a draft of an auxiliary for a democratic world order'.

George Orwell in his essay Politics and the English Language[22] used a sentence of Hogben's as an example of how not to write, particularly in relation to the use of metaphors.

Above all, we cannot play

ducks and drakes
with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables (...)

— Orwell (1946), quoting Hogben, Interglossa (1943)

Professor Hogben plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions (...)

— Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946)

Personal life

In 1918 Hogben married the mathematician, statistician, socialist and feminist

Welsh and they had four children.[23]

In the 1950s Hogben settled at Glyn Ceiriog in north Wales, where he bought a cottage. That decade his marriage to Enid broke down; the couple separated in 1953 and divorced in 1957. Later that year Hogben married (Mary) Jane Roberts (née Evans), a local widowed retired school headmistress, who was seven years younger. Widowed by the death of Jane in 1974, he died at the War Memorial Hospital at Wrexham[3] in 1975 aged 79 and was cremated at nearby Pentre Bychan.[24] He was an atheist, and defined himself as a "scientific humanist".[25][26]

Awards

Hogben was awarded the Neill Prize, and a gold medal, for his work in mathematical genetics.[27] In 1936, Hogben became a Fellow of the Royal Society.[28] The citation read:

Distinguished for his work in Experimental Zoology, especially in respect of the mechanism of colour change in Amphibia and Reptilia. He has published a series of important papers on the effect of hormones on the pigmentary effector system and on the reproductive cycle of vertebrates, and has worked on many branches of comparative physiology. More recently he has made substantial contributions to genetics, especially with regard to man.

Legacy

Hogben's research has left a lasting impression on the history of biology. The

human genome project
all incorporate some element of disagreement over the primacy of the gene. Hogben's attack on that primacy by appeal to the interdependence of nature and nurture has been echoed in each successive dispute.

The Hogben Archive

The Lancelot Thomas Hogben papers are held in Special Collections Archived 28 August 2009 at the Wayback Machine, University of Birmingham. Archive highlights include a draft of his autobiography (later edited and published by his son Adrian Hogben and his wife), correspondence, hand drawn diagrams for his books, and reflections on his life and works. (For a review of the Hogben Archive, see Tabery 2006).

Works

  • A Short Life of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), p. 64 (London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1918)[30]
  • Exiles of the Snow, and Other Poems (1918)
  • An Introduction to Recent Advances in Comparative Physiology (1924) with Frank R. Winton
  • The Pigmentary Effector System. A review of the physiology of colour response (1924)
  • Comparative Physiology (1926)
  • Comparative Physiology of Internal Secretion (1927)
  • The Nature of Living Matter (1930)
  • Genetic Principles in Medical and Social Science (1931)
  • Nature or Nurture - The William Withering Lectures for 1933 (1933)
  • Mathematics for the Million: A Popular Self-Educator (London,
    Frank Horrabin, Primers for the Age of Plenty - No. 1. Re-issued in the United States by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (1937).[31]
  • The Retreat from Reason (1936)
  • Science for the Citizen: A Self-Educator Based on the Social Background of Scientific Discovery (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1938), illustrated by Frank Horrabin, Primers for the Age of Plenty - No. 2.
  • Political Arithmetic: A Symposium of Population Studies (1938) editor
  • Dangerous Thoughts (1939)
  • Author in Transit (1940)
  • Principles of Animal Biology (1940)
  • Interglossa: A Draft of an Auxiliary for a Democratic world order, Being an Attempt to Apply Semantic Principles to Language Design (1943)
  • The Loom of Language: A Guide To Foreign Languages For The Home Student by Frederick Bodmer (1944), edited by Hogben, Primers for the Age of Plenty - No. 3.
  • An Introduction to Mathematical Genetics (1946)
  • History of the Homeland: The Story of the British Background by Henry Hamilton (1947), edited by Hogben, Primers for the Age of Plenty - No. 4.
  • The New Authoritarianism (1949) Conway Memorial Lecture 1949[33]
  • From Cave Painting To Comic Strip: A Kaleidoscope of Human Communication (1949)
  • Chance and Choice by Cardpack and Chessboard (1950)
  • Man Must Measure: The Wonderful World of Mathematics (1955)
  • Statistical theory. The relationship of probability, credibility and error. An examination of the contemporary crisis in statistical theory from a behaviorist viewpoint (1957)
  • The Wonderful World Of Energy (1957)[34]
  • The Signs of Civilisation (1959)
  • The Wonderful World of Communication (1959)
  • Mathematics in the Making (1960)
  • Essential World English (1963) with Jane Hogben and Maureen Cartwright
  • Science in Authority: Essays (1963)
  • The Mother Tongue (1964)
  • Whales for the Welsh — A Tale of War and Peace with Notes for those who Teach or Preach (1967)
  • Beginnings and Blunders or Before Science Began (1970)
  • The Vocabulary Of Science (1970) with Maureen Cartwright
  • Astronomer Priest and Ancient Mariner (1972)
  • Maps, Mirrors and Mechanics (1973)
  • Columbus, the Cannon Ball and the Common Pump (1974)
  • How The World Was Explored, editor, with Marie Neurath and Joseph Albert Lauwerys
  • Hogben, Anne; Hogben, Lancelot Thomas; Hogben, Adrian. Lancelot Hogben: scientific humanist: an unauthorised autobiography (1998)[35]

See also

References

  1. ^
    PMID 11615739
    .
  2. .
  3. ^ required.)
  4. .
  5. .
  6. .
  7. .
  8. .
  9. ^ "University of London Historical Record 1836-1926". 1912. p. 432.
  10. ^ a b c Kunitz, Stanley J. and Haycraft, Howard Twentieth Century Authors, A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature, (Third Edition). New York, The H.W. Wilson Company, 1950, (pp. 658–59)
  11. ^ "University of London Historical Record 1836-1926". 1912. p. 246.
  12. .
  13. ^ a b Kean, Sam (2017). "The Birds, the Bees, and the Froggies". Distillations. 3 (2): 5. Retrieved 17 April 2018.
  14. ^ name="Distillations"
  15. OCLC 558736058
    .
  16. ^ Shapiro Zwarenstein, Hillel Harry (March 1935). "A test fr the early diagnosis of pregnancy on the South African clawed toad (Xenopus leaves)" (PDF). South African Medical Journal. 9: 202.
  17. S2CID 4123060
    .
  18. .
  19. .
  20. ^ (pp. 110-112)
  21. ^ a b "Mathematics for the Million...praised by Einstein, H. G. Wells and others, it was reprinted in paperback in 1993." De Smith, Michael John, Maths for the Mystified : An Exploration of the History of Mathematics and Its Relationship to Modern-Day Science and Computing.Leicester : Matador, 2006. (p.192)
  22. ^ "George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946". Archived from the original on 15 July 2010. Retrieved 15 July 2010.
  23. . Retrieved 24 February 2021.
  24. ^ "Death Notice". Shropshire Star (Wrexham edition). 25 August 1975. p. 2.
  25. ^ "A reader who has suffered me so far will have realised how much of my mental energy had been hitherto absorbed in a fruitless search for an intellectually compelling rationale to rescue some fragments from the wreckage of my family faith. The mood of liberation I experienced when I finally discarded the last remnant of theism was no less exhilarating than that of Bunyan's Pilgrim when the burden of sin fell from his back. [...] In retrospect, the final steps seem as sudden as they were painless. [...] As I looked upward [at the night sky], I realised that the sole prospect was limitless expanse of unthreatening and impersonal emptiness — but for unapproachable galaxies — of a universe without purpose of punishment or reward for a lately arrived animal species, free to make or mar its own destiny without help or hindrance from above." Lancelot Hogben, Lancelot Hogben: Scientific Humanist: An Unauthorised Autobiography, edited by Adrian and Ann Hogben. Merlin Press, 1998.
  26. ^ I Believe. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1940. pp. 115–128.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  27. ^ name="k&h"
  28. ^ name="frs"
  29. S2CID 46322531
    .
  30. Notes and Records of the Royal Society, London, 1999; vol. 53: pp. 361-369, part 2 Archived 24 September 2015 at the Wayback Machine
  31. ^ Phillip Gething, "Forum: A whiff of optimism – Whatever happened to self-improvement?", New Scientist, 21 July 1990. Retrieved 6 January 2019.
  32. ^ "1936 Lancelot Hogben: The Retreat From Reason". Conway Hall Ethical Society. Archived from the original on 16 December 2014. Retrieved 16 December 2014.
  33. ^ "1949 Lancelot Hogben: The New Authoritarianism". Conway Hall Ethical Society. Archived from the original on 16 December 2014. Retrieved 16 December 2014.
  34. Gale, Floyd C. (September 1958). "Galaxy's 5 Star Shelf". Galaxy Science Fiction
    . p. 104.
  35. .

Further reading

External links