John Scott Haldane CH FRS (May 3, 1860 – March 14/March 15, 1936) was a Scottish physiologist famous for intrepid self-experimenting which led to many important discoveries about the human body and the nature of gases. He also used his son J. B. S. Haldane as a guinea pig, even when he was quite young. John Haldane locked himself in sealed chambers breathing lethal cocktails of gases while recording their effect on his mind and body. He visited the scenes of many mining disasters and investigated their causes. When the Germans used poison gas in World War I Haldane went to the front at the request of British secretary of state, Lord Kitchener and attempted to identify the gases being used. One outcome of this was his invention of the first gas mask [1]. His son, J.B.S. Haldane became equally famous, both by extending his father's interest in diving and as a key figure in the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis.

Haldane was born in Edinburgh. He was the son of Robert Haldane and the grandson of the Scottish evangelist James Alexander Haldane. His mother was Mary Elizabeth Burdon-Sanderson, the daughter of Richard Burdon-Sanderson and the granddaughter of Sir Thomas Burdon. His maternal uncle was the physiologist John Scott Burdon-Sanderson. He was the brother of Elizabeth Haldane, William Stowell Haldane and Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane.

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades. Hitchens, often referred to colloquially as "Hitch", was a columnist and literary critic for New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Mirror, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was an author of twelve books and five collections of essays. As a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, he was a prominent public intellectual, and his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.

Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales. Although he supported the Falklands War, his key split from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan describes him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.