Annual JBS Haldane Award for Best Undergraduate Transhumanist Paper

John Haldane
Transhumanist Pioneer

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane is an excellent symbol for this award since his essays had such a wide impact on the transhumanist imagination.

John Haldane was one of the first twentieth century biologists to promote the posthuman possibilities made possible by science and technology.  In his landmark essay  "Daedalus or Science and the Future" (1923) Haldane argued against knee-jerk biases against biological progress and predicted "ectogenesis" or "test-tube babies" and other futurist technologies. He said:

The biologist is the most romantic figure on earth. With the fundamentals of ectogenesis in his brain, the biologist is
the possessor of knowledge that is going to revolutionize human life....The chemical or physical inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god. But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which has not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural.
J.B.S. Haldane, 1923 "Daedalus, or Science and the Future

Haldane was a tireless and charismatic popularizer of science in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1932 Haldane was elected to the British Royal Society and the following year became Professor of Genetics at University College in London.

Haldane was an active anti-fascist, and worked to defend the Spanish Republic against the rise of fascism. While at Oxford Haldane had joined the eugenics society, but later he became a leading critic of eugenics as unscientific nonsense.  Haldane became a Communist in the middle part of his life (1937-1950), but left the Communist Party over the travesty of Lysenkoism and the revelations about Stalin. In 1957 Haldane emigrated to India to protest the Anglo-French invasion of Suez. He worked at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta before becoming head of the Orissa State Genetics and Biometry Laboratory in 1962.

In 1964 Haldane coined the term "clones" in his essay "Biological
Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten-Thousand Years."

For more information about John Haldane:

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SPhaldane.htm

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane