Helen Spurway

Helen Spurway (Helen Haldane) (c. 1917 – 15 February 1978,Hyderabad) was a biologist and the second wife of J. B. S. Haldane. She emigrated to India in 1957 along with Haldane and conducted research in field biology along with Krishna Dronamraju, Suresh Jayakar, and others.

Spurway obtained her Ph.D. in genetics under the supervision of J.B.S. Haldane, whom she married later, at University College, London. Her early research was in the genetics of Drosophila subobscura, but later switched to the reproductive biology of the guppy, Lebistes reticulatus. Her claim, in 1955, that parthenogenesis, which occurs in the guppy in nature, may also occur (though very rarely) in the human species, leading to so-called "virgin births" created some sensation among her colleagues and the lay public alike [(TIME magazine, November 28, 1955; Editorial in The Lancet, 2: 967 (1955)].

In 1959, at the Indian Statistical Institute she turned her attention to the genetics of the giant silkworm Antheraea mylitta, raising them in captivity to test the quality of their silk. In January 1961 she and J.B.S.H., assisted by their associate Krishna Dronamraju, were hosts to United States National Science Fair biology winners Gary Botting (zoology) and Susan Brown (botany). Using a novel technique of pheromone transfer, Botting had cross-bred an Antheraea mylitta female with a Telea polyphemus male, with viable offspring. Botting and Spurway concluded that the polyphemus moth was misclassified and should be included under the genus Antheraea.

At the time, the larvae of her mylitta specimens were developing black dots, which she attributed to adaptation to their artificial, dark environment in a similar way that the peppered moth (Biston betularia) had apparently adapted to its changing urban environment in Manchester, England. That "urban adaptation" scenario had been touted by many textbooks as clear evidence of evolution in action. J.B.S. Haldane had himself made statistical calculations as early as 1924 about the appearance of light and melanic populations of the peppered moth, then known as Amphidasys betularia. Decades later, E.B. Ford and Bernard Kettlewell (with whom Helen Spurway was known to have "broken bread" in Oxford by eating a live moth or two) attempted to capitalize on the supposed evolutionary adaptation of the peppered moth. Kettlewell apparently fudged his data to obtain results that approximated Haldane's 1924 statistical calculations.Gary Botting already regarded the case of the peppered moth as tantamount to belief in Lamarckian evolution. He diagnosed the black spots on Spurway's larvae as pebrine, a disease deadly to lepidoptera.

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