But before that day comes chemistry will be applied to the production of a still more important group of physiologically active substances, namely foods. The facts about food are rather curious. Everyone knows that food is ultimately produced by plants, though we may get it at second or third hand if we eat animals or their products. But the average plant turns most of its sugar not into starch which is digestible, but into cellulose which is not, but forms its woody skeleton. The hoofed animals have dealt with this problem in their own way, by turning their bellies into vast hives of bacteria that attack cellulose, and on whose by-products they live. We have got to do the same, but outside our bodies. It may be done on chemical lines. Irvine has obtained a 95% yield of sugar from cellulose, but at a prohibitive cost. Or we may use micro-organisms, but in any case within the next century sugar and starch will be about as cheap as sawdust. Many of our foodstuffs, including the proteins, we shall probably build up from simpler sources such as coal and atmospheric nitrogen. I should be inclined to allow 120 years, but not much more, before a completely satisfactory diet can be produced in this way on a commercial scale.

This will mean that agriculture will become a luxury, and that mankind will be completely urbanized. Personally I do not regret the probable disappearance of the agricultural labourer in favour of the factory worker, who seems to me a higher type of person from most points of view. Human progress in historical time has been the progress of cities dragging a reluctant countryside in their wake. Synthetic food will substitute the flower garden and the factory for the dunghill and the slaughterhouse, and make the city at last self-sufficient.

Daedalus, or, Science and the Future
A paper read to the Heretics, Cambridge, on February 4th, 1923. by JBS Haldane

Haldane coined the term 'cloning' as well as writing on the potential of invetro fertilization in 1924!

In 1924, Haldane published a truly remarkable work of fiction entitled “Daedalus”.

What made it so remarkable was that it introduced the concept and scientific feasibility of “test-tube babies” brought to life without sexual intercourse or pregnancy. At the time, of course, it was regarded as nothing more than shocking science fiction.

But Haldane himself knew very well that his theory would in all probability one day become a reality.

Haldane was the inspiration for Alduous Huxley’s “Brave New World”

“Daedalus” was a hugely popular and influential book. It was the inspiration for Alduous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (Huxley and Haldane were friends), published in 1932, in which a society based on test-tube babies turns out to be less than ideal.

By the mid-1930’s, leading geneticists announced that “in vitro” (“in glass”) fertilisations would soon be possible and within 40 years the first test-tube baby was science fact.

Ironically, in spite of his predicting its feasibility, Haldane became a fierce critic of eugenics (the science of tampering with the hereditary qualities of a race or breed), complaining that he suspected it was being distorted for political ends by what he called “ferocious enemies of human liberty”. The later work of “Doctor Death” Josef Mengele certainly demonstrated that his fears were entirely justified.

As a microcosmic example of Haldane’s massive influence on modern genetics, in one of the last speeches of his life, “Biological Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten Thousand Years” (1963), Haldane coined the word “clone” for the first time, from the Greek word for twig.