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Lancelot Hogben Information

Lancelot Thomas Hogben FRS (9 December 1895 – 22 August 1975) was a versatile British experimental zoologist and medical statistician. He is best known for developing Xenopus laevis as a model organism for biological research in his early career, attacking the eugenics movement in the middle of his career, and popularising books on science, mathematics and language in his later career.

Contents

Early life

Hogben was born in Portsmouth and brought up in Southsea, Hampshire. His parents were Plymouth Brethren; he broke young from the family religion. He attended Tottenham County School in London, where his family had moved, and then as a medical student studied physiology at Trinity College, Cambridge. He took his degree in 1915. He had acquired socialist convictions, changing the name of the university's Fabian Society to Socialist Society and went to become an active member of the Independent Labour Party. Later in life he preferred to describe himself as 'a scientific humanist'.

World War I

During World War I he was a pacifist and was imprisoned as a conscientious objector in 1916 at Wormwood Scrubs; this was after six months working with the Red Cross in France, and his deliberate return to Cambridge. His health collapsed after maltreatment and he was released in 1917. Hogben married the mathematician, statistician, and feminist Enid Charles in 1918.

Academic

After a year's convalescence he took lecturing positions in London universities, moving in 1922 to the University of Edinburgh and its Animal Breeding Research Department. He then went to McGill University, and in 1927 to a zoology chair at the University of Cape Town. He worked on endocrinology and used the Xenopus frog. while using Xenopus to investigate the endocrine system, it was fortuitously discovered that female Xenopus frogs, when injected with urine from a pregnant woman, ovulated within hours. Thus, the Hogben Pregnancy Test was created and remained the major, international pregnancy test for decades. He found the job in South Africa attractive, but his antipathy to the country's racial policies drove him to leave.

In 1930 Hogben moved to the London School of Economics, in a chair for social biology. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1936. 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.

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.

Attack on eugenics

While Chair for Social Biology at the LSE, Hogben unleashed a relentless attack on the British eugenics movement, which was at its apex in the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast to eugenicists, who commonly drew a strict line between heredity (or nature) and environment (or nurture), Hogben highlighted the 'interdependence of nature and nurture'. Hogben's appeal to this interdependence of nature and nurture marked the first time gene-environment interaction (or 'gene-environment interplay') was utilized to undermine statistical attempts to partition the contributions of nature and nurture, as well as the eugenic implications drawn from those statistics. Hogben's foil throughout this period was R.A. Fisher, the leading scientist-eugenicist of the day (Tabery 2008).

Society for Experimental Biology

In 1923, Hogben was a founder of the Society for Experimental Biology and its organ the British Journal of Experimental Biology (renamed Journal of Experimental Biology in 1930), along with Julian Huxley and geneticist Francis Albert Eley Crew (1886–1973). According to Gary Werskey, Hogben was the only one of the founders not holding any eugenic ideas.

Recent research has "revealed that contrary to Hogben's published recollection of the early years of the SEB, which was published in 1966 and has been circulating in the literature since, J.B.S. Haldane (1892–1964) was not one of the 'Founding Fathers of the SEB'" (Erlingsson 2006).

Writer

Hogben produced two best-selling works of popular science, Mathematics for the Million (1936) and Science for the Citizen (1938). These were big ambitious books. 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’.

Later life

During World War II Hogben had responsibility for the British Army's medical statistics. He was Mason Professor of Zoology at the University of Birmingham 1941–1947 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.

Hogben's legacy

Hogben's research has left a lasting impression on the history of biology. Xenopus laevis, which Hogben first developed as a model organism, is now one of the most widely-used model organisms in biological research. Likewise, his emphasis on the interdependence of nature and nurture has had and continues to have an impact on scientific practice and scientific debate. In terms of scientific practice, modern research on phenotypic plasticity, gene-environment interaction, and developmental systems theory all owes much to the legacy of Hogben's initial emphasis on understanding nature and nurture interdependently rather than in dichotomy. In terms of scientific debate, the dispute between Hogben and R.A. Fisher over gene-environment interaction was the first of many subsequent disputes over the extent to which the primacy of the gene can be understood independently of its developmental relationship with the environment (Tabery 2007). The nature-nurture debate, the IQ controversy, the heritability wars, concerns over the geneticization of complex human traits, and arguments over the promises and perils of 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, 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

References

Notes

External links

For a tribute to Mathematics for the Million from Fields Medallist David Mumford

Some of the correspondence between Hogben and R. A. Fisher is available online

Persondata
Name Hogben, Lancelot
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth 9 December 1895
Place of birth
Date of death 22 August 1975
Place of death

Categories: 1895 births | 1975 deaths | British conscientious objectors | British zoologists | English science writers | English non-fiction writers | People from Portsmouth | Evolutionary biologists | Academics of the London School of Economics | University of Cape Town academics | Fellows of the Royal Society | Academics of the University of Birmingham | Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge | British statisticians

 

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