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Lancelot Thomas Hogben (9 December 1895 - 22 August 1975) was a versatile English experimental zoologist, and medical statistician. He is now best known for his popularising books on science, mathematics and language.
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He was born in Portsmouth and brought up in Southsea, Hampshire. His parents were Plymouth Brethren; he broke young from the family religion. He attended Tottenham County School in London, where his family had moved, and then as a medical student studied physiology at Trinity College, Cambridge. He took his degree in 1915. He had acquired socialist convictions, changing the name of the university's Fabian Society to Socialist Society and went to become an active member of the Independent Labour Party. Later in life he preferred to describe himself as 'a scientific humanist'.
During World War I he was a pacifist and was imprisoned as a conscientious objector in 1916; this was after six months working with the Red Cross in France, and his deliberate return to Cambridge. His health collapsed after maltreatment and he was released in 1917, when he married the mathematician, statistician and feminist Enid Charles.
After a year's convalescence he took lecturing positions in London universities, moving in 1922 to the University of Edinburgh and its Animal Breeding Research Department. He then went to McGill University, and in 1927 to a zoology chair at the University of Cape Town. He worked on endocrinology and used the Xenopus frog. This had direct application to pregnancy testing. He found the job in South Africa attractive, but his antipathy to the country's racial policies drove him to leave.
In 1930 he moved to the London School of Economics, in a chair for social biology. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1936. The citation read
Distinguished for his work in Experimental Zoology, especially in respect of the mechanism of colour change in Amphibia and Reptilia. He has published a series of important papers on the effect of hormones on the pigmentary effector system and on the reproductive cycle of vertebrates, and has worked on many branches of comparative physiology. More recently he has made substantial contributions to genetics, especially with regard to man.
The social biology position at the LSE was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and when it withdrew funding Hogben moved, becoming Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Aberdeen in 1937.
He was a founder of the Society for Experimental Biology and its organ the British Journal of Experimental Biology (renamed Journal of Experimental Biology in 1930) in 1923, along with Julian Huxley and geneticist Francis Albert Eley Crew (1886-1973). According to Gary Werskey, Hogben was the only one of the founders not holding some eugenicist ideas.
Recent research has "revealed that contrary to Hogben's published recollection of the early years of the SEB, which was published in 1966 and has been circulating in the literature since, J.B.S. Haldane (1892-1964) was not one of the 'Founding Fathers of the SEB'" (Erlingsson 2006).
Hogben produced two best-selling works of popular science, Mathematics for the Million (1936) and Science for the Citizen (1938). These were big ambitious books. While at Aberdeen, Hogben developed an interest in language. Besides editing The Loom of Language by his friend Frederick Bodmer, he created an international language, Interglossa, as ‘a draft of an auxiliary for a democratic world order’.
During World War II Hogben had responsibility for the British Army's medical statistics. He was Mason Professor of Zoology at the University of Birmingham 1941-1947 and professor of medical statistics there 1947-1961, when he retired. He then took a position at the University of Guyana.
For a tribute to Mathematics for the Million from Fields Medallist David Mumford
Some of the correspondence between Hogben and R. A. Fisher is available online
