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Throughout his youth, the young Haldane helped his father with experiments. By the time he was a teenager, the two often tested gases and gas masks together, taking turns to see how long it took them to pass out.
在整個年輕時代，小霍爾丹一直是他父親做實驗的幫手。到10來歲的時候父子倆經常一起測試氣體和防毒面具，輪流觀察要經過多長時間他們才會昏死過去。
Though J. B. S. Haldane never took a degree in science (he studied classics at Oxford), he became a brilliant scientist in his own right, mostly in Cambridge. The biologist Peter Medawar, who spent his life around mental Olympians, called him "the cleverest man I ever knew." Huxley likewise parodied the younger Haldane in his novel Antic Hay, but also used his ideas on genetic manipulation of humans as the basis for the plot of Brave New World. Among many other achievements, Haldane played a central role in marrying Darwinian principles of evolution to the genetic work of Gregor Mendel to produce what is known to geneticists as the Modern Synthesis.
小霍爾丹沒有獲得過科學方面的學位（他在牛津大學學的是古典學課程），但憑著自己的能力成了一位杰出的科學家，大部分時間里在劍橋為政府工作。一生跟智力超群的人打交道的生物學家彼得·梅達沃稱他為“我見過的最聰明名的人”。赫胥黎也以小霍爾丹為原型在小說《古怪的圓圈舞》里塑造人物，還以他關于遺傳決定人的本性的思想為基礎，設計了小說《美妙的新世界》里的情節。在其他成就方面，小霍爾丹還把達爾文的進化論與格雷戈爾·孟德爾在遺傳方面的成就結合起來，提出了被遺傳學家稱之為“新途徑”的理論。
Perhaps uniquely among human beings, the younger Haldane found World War I "a very enjoyable experience" and freely admitted that he "enjoyed the opportunity of killing people." He was himself wounded twice. After the war he became a successful popularizer of science and wrote twenty-three books (as well as over four hundred scientific papers). His books are still thoroughly readable and instructive, though not always easy to find. He also became an enthusiastic Marxist.
與眾不同的是，小霍爾丹覺得第一次世界大戰是“一次很愉快的經歷”，直言不諱地承認他“喜歡有個殺人的機會”。他本人也受過兩次傷。戰爭結束以后，他成功地成為一名科學普及工作者，寫了23本書（以及400多篇科學論文）。他的書至今依然可讀性很強，很有教育意義，雖然不總是容易找得找。他還成了一名熱忱的馬克思主義者。
