EARLY ONE FREEZING January morning in 1896, a massive explosion ripped through the Tylorstown Colliery in the Rhondda Valley. The force of the explosion blew the roof off pitshaft number 7 and sent a “black tornado of dust up through the shafts”. A quick count of the missing miners’ lamps suggested that more than 100 men were below. In addition, there were the boys, known as “the trappers”, employed to open and close the thick wooden doors in the pitch-black tunnels.

Alerted by a Home Office telegram, Dr J. S. Haldane arrived as quickly as the train connections from his Oxford laboratory would allow. The 35-year-old physiologist had been instructed to determine the cause of death and to test a theory. It was generally believed that deaths from such explosions were caused by blast injuries.

Haldane thought differently. He was convinced that three quarters of fatalities were due to suffocation from gases seeping into tunnels. But as Haldane talked to the Tylorstown rescue party, he found that the toxic gas produced after the explosion – known as “afterdamp” (damp from the German for steam, Dampf) – had not extinguished the miners’ lamps. This meant oxygen was present and therefore suffocation must be ruled out.

Even though it threatened his theory, the man The Times once described as a “medical detective” was excited by this intriguing new evidence. In order to explain what had happened, Haldane had the unenviable task of visiting the bereaved families to examine the bodies of the dead miners. Here he found the evidence he needed. From the pink and red appearance of their skin, he suddenly understood why so many miners were dying in pit explosions: carbon-monoxide poisoning. A distinctly carmine-red blood sample provided the final proof.

Martin Goodman begins his excellent biography of John Scott Haldane with a vivid account of the Tylorstown disaster. He has a novelist’s eye for evocative detail that lesser writers might miss and the result is as compelling as a historical novel.

Haldane visited 45 homes that day in search of evidence, homes where a father or son had left for work as usual, but returned in a coffin. Goodman shows how the mundane details of daily life can speak powerfully of the grief and loss in such a proud community: “Widows sat by the embers of fires. Laundry hung on a wooden rack connected by pulley to the ceiling. In the darkness the cotton shirts seemed blazingly white. These women would no longer have to combat the coal dust brought home on their husbands’ and sons’ clothes.”

Born into a Scottish aristocratic family whose motto was “suffer”, Haldane certainly suffered for his science. His life was, writes Goodman, “the greatest sustained physiological experiment in the history of the human lung”.

In his lifelong quest to understand the secrets of respiration, he became a connoisseur of rare gases, an authority on their detection and effects. After 29 minutes breathing carbon monoxide, Haldane calmly noted that he felt “distinctly abnormal”: he was panting, breathing 18 times a minute, his limbs shook and his pulse was racing. Soon, he began to feel unsteady on his feet.

Once, on his way home from his laboratory after such an experiment, he was stopped by an Oxford policeman who had observed the scientist’s stumbling progress. Haldane explained that it was not due to alcohol but gas. His housekeeper offered her sympathies to his wife, Kathleen: “I knows how you feel, ma’am. My husband’s just the same on a Friday night.”

In his report on the Tylorstown disaster, “Haldane delivered, for the first time, an accurate diagnosis of the greatest cause of death among miners”. It was Haldane who taught miners how to protect themselves using canaries or mice in specially designed cages. Such creatures are affected by gas 20 times faster than a man. According to Goodman, Haldane was “himself such a canary, putting his own health and life on the line to protect others”. He also invented breathing equipment that allowed rescue teams to operate safely. Thousands of men owe their lives to his work.

As a young researcher, he studied the air in overcrowded Dundee slums, turning up without warning in the middle of the night to collect air in bedrooms where eight people were sleeping. When a Select Committee called upon him to “delve inside the lower depths of government and analyse the stink that flowed beneath”, he ventured into the sewers below Westminster Palace. A born iconoclast, he successfully challenged the idea that “sewer air” was a cause of typhoid and other diseases.

Haldane liked nothing better than to explore dangerous mine shafts and sewers. But it was in the specially constructed, air-tight chamber in his lab that the effects of gases on people were revealed. In an age before risk assessments and ethics committees, Haldane was a serial self-experimenter. He also thought nothing of exposing his own son – the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane – to dangerous doses of chlorine and other noxious gases. His young daughter Naomi (later the writer Naomi Mitchison) once told a 6-year-old friend outside their house: “You come in. My father wants your blood.” Her friend screamed and ran away.

Haldane had a profound sense of public service and he believed passionately that the world could be made a better place through the appliance of science. From miners dying of carbon monoxide poisoning and soldiers being gassed like rats in the trenches, to mountaineers and aviators coping with high altitudes, Haldane showed that science could bring light into the darkness.

A friend described him as “almost quixotically anxious to do good to all mankind – and to teach them all a thing or two”. As Goodman’s fine biography shows, we still have a lot to learn from Dr J. S. Haldane.

Suffer and Survive: The Extreme Life of J. S Haldane by Martin Goodman

Simon & Schuster, £14.99; 320pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £13.49 (free p&p)

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