J.B.S. Haidane was one of those intellectual aristocratic radicals who have enlivened British life and thought for the last two hundred years. He pursued three distinct but simultaneous careers as an experimental physiologist (like his father), as a mathematical geneticist and statistician (he, Fisher and Wright were the first people to give extensive mathematical treatments of Darwinian evolution from the Mendelian viewpoint) and as a scientific journalist. One of the high spots of his stormy public life was his dismissal from Cambridge at the instigation of the ‘Sex Viri’ (‘Six Men’, a kind of disciplinary committee) on moral grounds (he had been a co-respondent in a divorce suit). He fought back and gained reinstatement (and the ‘Six Men’ added one to their number to become the ‘Septem Viri’). (On a more peaceful level he wrote a curious children's book My Friend Mr Leaky which I remember as one of my childhood favourites.) Here is an article which he wrote for Eureka (the Cambridge undergraduate mathematical journal) in 1941. It was entitled ‘The Faking of Genetical Results’.

My father published a number of papers on blood analysis. In the proofs of one of them the following sentence, or something very like it, occurred: ‘Unless the blood is very thoroughly faked, it will be found that duplicate determinations rarely agree.’ Every biochemist will sympathise with this opinion. I may add that the verb ‘to lake’, when applied to blood, means to break up the corpuscles so that it becomes transparent.

In genetical work also, duplicates rarely agree unless they are faked.