Whenitcameto getting down and dirty, nobody did it betterthanthat scion of the Scottish gentry John Scott Haldane. If ever a man went where angels feared (or at least disdained) to tread, it was him.

Driven by that mixture of curiosity and ruthless determination that inhabits all real scientists, Haldane would pick through his own excreta to find out whether his gut was producing phenol or immerse himself in the reeking sewers of Dundee and London to study "sewer gas". He would also suck in perilous amounts of carbon monoxide so that he could detail the effects on the human physique - his own.

"After walking four or five times up and down the room I staggered and nearly fell," he wrote after one encounter. "Attempted to walk along the line of one of the boards on the floor. Did so with much difficulty and great staggering and waving of arms."

In that instance, Haldane ended up with a blood mixture containing 56% carbon monoxide, a saturation that could have killed him. But when it came to pursuing a line of scientific inquiry he was brave to the point of recklessness. Which is pretty much the narrative drive of Martin Goodman's biographyofthisextraordinary Scotsman, who advanced the cause of public health as well as siring two extraordinary offspring - the geneticist and Marxist JBS Haldane and the writer and historian Naomi Mitchison.

Most people know of Haldane without really knowing anything about him. But, if Goodman's thesis holds water, he deserves to be up there with legendary Scots such as James Clerk Maxwell and Alexander Graham Bell.

Born in May 1860, the third son of awell-heeledEdinburghlawyer, Haldane was educated at Edinburgh Academy, Edinburgh University, the University of Jena in Germany and in the hills and countryside of Scotland. He believed that nothing fired up the senses and brain more than a stiff walk across rough country. Like many Scots of that (and later generations) he moved south to pursue his career, spending most of his life in Oxford.

The significance of Haldane's work can be difficult to describe, mainly because he did so much. As a scientist, his interests ranged far and wide in the great Scottish tradition of the practical philosopher, the hands-on man of science. Unsupported theory seemed to bore him. His urge to experiment never flagged and it took him to many dark and dangerous places.

Haldane clearly loved his children dearly but never hesitated to involve them in his experiments. Goodman writesthatdaughterNaomi,"had thetaskofstandingoutsideher father's private gas chamber, peering in through the observation window in case her father should pass out, when she was to pull him clear and seek to resuscitate him." A daunting task for any child.

This great Scottish Victorian lived long enough to see the rise of Adolf Hitler and the intellectual corruption of the German universities he so admired. His name topped the petition protesting against the treatment of Jews in German academia before he died in March 1936.

"Haldane had pledged his body and his life to effect an astonishing range of improvements in public health, industrial safety and human possibilities," writes Goodman. "Men walked ocean beds, worked the deepest mines, dared scale Everest and envisage space flight, while doctors now had a bank of expertise and equipment to deploy in tending respiratory problems in their patients, all on the back of knowledge that he brought into the world."

In this fine book, Goodman has done a very decent job of resurrecting the life, times and work of one of 19th century Britain's most daring scientists.