George Price was no stranger to a spot of drama. Born in 1922 to a stage actress mother, the American scientist and polymath worked on the Manhattan Project, turned his hand to journalism, produced an influential equation explaining altruism and, in his later years, underwent a spectacular religious conversion. Yet for a life packed with twists, turns and tragedy his story has eluded the limelight. Until now.

Opening later this month at Camden People’s theatre in London, Calculating Kindness attempts to unpick the life of Price, delving into his mind and his mathematics to illuminate the little-known story of a man who probed a fundamental facet of the human condition: altruism. “His story illuminates so many big and important ideas about who we are,” says director Laura Farnworth. “One of the big themes of the piece is how much should we sacrifice for our own ambitions and what we want from life – and balancing that with family,” she adds.

It is a play born of serendipity. Chancing upon a Reader’s Digest review of Oren Harman’s 2010 biography of the scientist, The Price of Altruism, Farnworth became captivated by Price’s journey. “There were such acute contradictions and U-turns that I just couldn’t quite believe here is this amazing story that was actually true,” she says.

In wrestling with his discovery, Price began to question why it should have been he who came up with the equation

Indeed Price’s extraordinary career was nothing if not eclectic. After a year at Harvard University, he joined the University of Chicago to study chemistry where, during the 1940s, he was recruited to a team of scientists racing to develop the atomic bomb – the so-called Manhattan Project. Then followed various stints as a medical researcher, a science journalist, and even as an employee at IBM. But despite a diverse career, Price remained disappointed at his inability to make a major breakthrough himself. “The important thing about him is he is cropping up on quite big stages but he is never the main player,” says Farnworth.

All that, however, was about to change.

Not a man to settle for a ho-hum existence, in 1967 Price left behind his two daughters and ex-wife, determined to make his mark in London. It was there he happened upon a paper that was to change his life: work by the eminent evolutionary biologist WD Hamilton, which sought to explain why organisms demonstrate altruistic behaviour. “Altruism is nothing to do with a warm glow,” explains Professor Alan Grafen, one of the play’s scientific advisers and a biologist at the University of Oxford. “The biological meaning of altruism is to do with reducing the number of offspring you have in your lifetime and simultaneously increasing the number of offspring another individual has in their lifetime.”

Hamilton concluded that altruism was passed down the generations because the trait benefited the fitness of an organism’s “relatives”. “Hamilton is famous for working on the evolution of altruism and explaining altruism in terms of kin selection,” adds Dr Andy Gardner, another of the play’s scientific advisers and a biologist at the University of St Andrews. “So individuals nepotistically being altruistic towards their relatives because they share genes in common with those individuals.” In other words, as Grafen puts it, “[Hamilton] claimed to have shown that indeed natural selection, if it affects social behaviour, can cause organisms to behave in a way that looks altruistic, but actually it is genetically selfish.”

It was a theory that hit a nerve with Price. “He literally comes across [the paper] and goes, ‘Wow, really?’,” says Farnworth. Beavering away to prove Hamilton wrong, Price ended up in agreement with him and in the process created his own seminal mathematical relationship, now known as the Price equation. “In the end he derived this amazing equation,” says Gardner. “It now provides the foundation for the modern theory of group selection.” Indeed, as Gardner himself has found in his own research, “it keeps finding new uses in surprising places”.

Price had finally made his mark. But in wrestling with his discovery, Price began to question why it should have been he who came up with the equation. “He decides that the only way that that could have happened is it must be a gift from God,” explains Farnworth. The upshot was an intense religious conversion. But disaster ensued. Obsessed with the concept of selflessness, Price took in the homeless and was eventually reduced to living in a squat. Finally, in January 1975, he took his own life, cutting his carotid artery with a pair of nail scissors.

It was a tragic end. Yet playwright Lydia Adetunji is adamant that the production itself strikes a very different tone. “That is bleak,” she says of Price’s demise. “But there is something quite life-affirming about the way he is just interested in all these questions and sort of throws himself at them.”

Price was a complex character whose attitudes and ideas shifted dramatically throughout his life, says Farnworth. Delving into his past, she spent hours studying Price’s letters in the British Library, bringing in the expertise of Dr Isabel Valli of King’s College London to tease apart his disposition. “Understanding him from psychiatric terms has helped me understand how the seemingly contradictory nature of George, and some of the choices he makes, can come into one personality,” Farnworth explains.

Ultimately, says Adetunji, in putting Price and his equation centre stage, she hopes his life will finally get the recognition it deserves. “He is just the man who never did anything by halves.”

Calculating Kindness runs from 29 March to 16 April at the Camden People’s theatre, London NW1