Lancelot Hogben

Lancelot Thomas Hogben FRS FRSE (9 December 1895 – 22 August 1975) was a British experimental zoologist and medical statistician. He developed the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) as a model organism for biological research in his early career. He also attacked the eugenics movement in the middle of his career, and wrote popular books on science, mathematics and language in his later career.

He created an international language, Interglossa, as 'a draft of an auxiliary for a democratic world order'.

 Biography 
 Early life and education 
Hogben was born and grew up in Southsea, near Portsmouth in Hampshire. His parents were Methodists. In 1907, his family moved to Stoke Newington in London, where his mother had grown up. He went to Tottenham County School and later studied physiology as a medical student at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Before going to Cambridge, Hogben enrolled as an external student at the University of London and earned a Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree in 1914. He got his degree from Cambridge in 1915, finishing with a basic (Ordinary) Bachelor of Arts (BA). During this time, he became a socialist. He changed the name of the university’s Fabian Society to the Socialist Society and joined the Independent Labour Party. Later in life, he called himself a "scientific humanist."

 World War I 
During the First World War, Hogben was a pacifist (against war) and joined the Quakers. He worked for six months in France with the Red Cross, helping people affected by the war as part of the Friends’ War Victims Relief Service and the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. After returning to Cambridge, he was jailed in 1916 at Wormwood Scrubs because he refused to fight in the war (as a conscientious objector). His health got worse in prison, so he was released in 1917. His brother George was also a conscientious objector and worked with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit.

 Personal life 
In 1918, Hogben married Enid Charles, who was a mathematician, statistician, socialist, and feminist from Denbigh. They had two sons and two daughters together. Hogben also learned to speak Welsh.

In the 1950s, he moved to Glyn Ceiriog in North Wales and bought a small cottage. During that time, his marriage with Enid ended. They separated in 1953 and got divorced in 1957. Later that same year, he married Jane Roberts (born Evans), a local retired school headmistress who was seven years younger than him.

Jane passed away in 1974, and Hogben died the following year, in 1975, at the War Memorial Hospital in Wrexham. He was 79 years old and was cremated at Pentre Bychan nearby. Hogben was an atheist and called himself a "scientific humanist."

Books he published
A Short Life of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), p. 64 (London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1918)Reprinted from Notes and Records of the Royal Society, London, 1999; vol. 53: pp. 361-369, part 2 
Exiles of the Snow, and Other Poems (1918)
An Introduction to Recent Advances in Comparative Physiology (1924) with Frank R. Winton
 The Pigmentary Effector System. A review of the physiology of colour response (1924)
Comparative Physiology (1926)
Comparative Physiology of Internal Secretion (1927)
The Nature of Living Matter (1930)
Genetic Principles in Medical and Social Science (1931)
Nature or Nurture - The William Withering Lectures for 1933 (1933)
Mathematics for the Million: A Popular Self-Educator (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1936), illustrated by Frank Horrabin, Primers for the Age of Plenty - No. 1. Re-issued in the United States by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (1937).Phillip Gething, "Forum: A whiff of optimism – Whatever happened to self-improvement?", New Scientist, 21 July 1990. Retrieved 6 January 2019.
The Retreat from Reason (1936) Conway Memorial Lecture 20 May 1936, chaired by Julian Huxley.
Science for the Citizen: A Self-Educator Based on the Social Background of Scientific Discovery (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1938), illustrated by Frank Horrabin, Primers for the Age of Plenty - No. 2.
Political Arithmetic: A Symposium of Population Studies (1938) editor
Dangerous Thoughts (1939)
Author in Transit (1940)
Principles of Animal Biology (1940)
Interglossa: A Draft of an Auxiliary for a Democratic world order, Being an Attempt to Apply Semantic Principles to Language Design (1943)
The Loom of Language: A Guide To Foreign Languages For The Home Student by Frederick Bodmer (1944), edited by Hogben, Primers for the Age of Plenty - No. 3.
An Introduction to Mathematical Genetics (1946)
History of the Homeland: The Story of the British Background by Henry Hamilton (1947), edited by Hogben, Primers for the Age of Plenty - No. 4.
The New Authoritarianism (1949) Conway Memorial Lecture 1949
From Cave Painting To Comic Strip: A Kaleidoscope of Human Communication (1949)
Chance and Choice by Cardpack and Chessboard (1950)
Man Must Measure: The Wonderful World of Mathematics (1955)
Statistical theory. The relationship of probability, credibility and error. An examination of the contemporary crisis in statistical theory from a behaviorist viewpoint (1957)
The Wonderful World Of Energy (1957)
The Signs of Civilisation (1959)
The Wonderful World of Communication (1959)
Mathematics in the Making (1960)
Essential World English (1963) with Jane Hogben and Maureen Cartwright
Science in Authority: Essays (1963)
The Mother Tongue (1964)
Whales for the Welsh — A Tale of War and Peace with Notes for those who Teach or Preach (1967)
Beginnings and Blunders or Before Science Began (1970)
The Vocabulary Of Science (1970) with Maureen Cartwright
Astronomer Priest and Ancient Mariner (1972)
 Maps, Mirrors and Mechanics (1973)
Columbus, the Cannon Ball and the Common Pump (1974)
How The World Was Explored, editor, with Marie Neurath and Joseph Albert Lauwerys
Hogben, Anne; Hogben, Lancelot Thomas; Hogben, Adrian. Lancelot Hogben: scientific humanist: an unauthorised autobiography (1998)

 Related pages 
 Leslie Hogben, granddaughter of Lancelot

References

Further reading

Erlingsson, Steindór J., "The Early History of the SEB and the BJEB." Society For Experimental Biology Bulletin, March, pp. 10–11, 2006. The article can be accessed here

 Other websites 
Lancelot Hogben biography at the Galton Institute
Scientific Humanism, in Time Magazine (11 March 1940)
Max Perutz on Lancelot Hogben and his autobiography in Times Higher Education (31 July 1998)
Details of research on Xenopus 
Royal Society certificate of election
Royal Society photograph
First part of Interglossa (there is a photograph of the author on p. 2.)
Brief excerpts from Interglossa
Full text and diagrams from Interglossa
Scientists' Nightstand: David Mumford - a tribute to Mathematics for the Million from Fields Medallist David Mumford
Correspondence of Sir R.A. Fisher: Calendar of Correspondence with Lancelot Hogben

Category:1895 births
Category:1975 deaths
Category:Glosa
Category:British statisticians
Category:English science writers
Category:British evolutionary biologists
Category:Fellows of the Royal Society
Category:British physiologists