Haldane, John Scott

Haldane, John Scott, 1860–1936, British scientist, b. Edinburgh; father of John Burdon Sanderson Haldane. He made many important contributions to mine safety, investigating principally the action of gases, the use of rescue equipment, and the incidence of pulmonary disease. He devised a decompression apparatus for the safe ascent of deep-sea divers, and in 1905 he discovered that regulation of breathing is determined by the effect of the amount of carbon dioxide in the blood on the respiratory center of the brain. He studied barometric pressure on an expedition to Pikes Peak, Colo., in 1911. He founded the Journal of Hygiene, and his published works include Organism and Environment (1917), New Physiology (1919), Respiration (1922), and The Philosophy of a Biologist (1936).

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