J. D. Bernal

John Desmond Bernal
John Desmond Bernal
Born	10 May 1901 Nenagh, Co. Tipperary
Died	15 September 1971 London, buried Battersea Cemetery, Morden (unmarked)
Nationality	United Kingdom
Citizenship	British
Alma mater	Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Known for	Science, politics and war work
Awards	Stalin Peace Prize in 1953
Scientific career
Fields	X-ray crystallography
Institutions	Birkbeck College, University of London
Doctoral advisor	Sir William Bragg
Doctoral students	Dorothy Hodgkin

John Desmond Bernal FRS (b.10 May 1901, Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, Ireland, d.London, 15 September 1971) was one of Britain’s best known and most controversial scientists, universally recognised as "Sage" for his knowledge and wisdom, and well known for pioneering X-ray crystallography.

Education and early career

Bernal was the son of a farmer of Italian and Spanish/Portuguese Sephardic Jewish descent. His mother was an American journalist. He was educated in England first at Stonyhurst College where according to biographer Maurice Goldsmith there was no science taught till the sixth form. Because of this he was moved to Bedford School at the age of thirteen. There, according to Goldsmith, for five years from 1914-1919 he found it 'extremely unpleasant' and most of his fellow students 'bored him' though his younger brother Kevin who was also there was 'some consolation' In 1919 he went to Emmanuel College, Cambridge University with a mathematical scholarship.

At Cambridge Bernal studied both mathematics and science for a BA degree in 1922, which he followed by another year of natural sciences. He taught himself the theory of space groups, including the quaternion method; this became the mathematical basis of later work on crystal structure. Whilst at Cambridge he also became known as "Sage", a nickname given to him about 1920 by a young woman working in Ogden's Bookshop at the corner of Bridge Street.

Career

After graduation, Bernal began research under Sir William Bragg at the Davy Faraday Laboratory at the Royal Institution in London. In 1924 he determined the structure of graphite. He also did work on bronze. He is also famous for having firstly proposed in 1929 the so-called Bernal sphere, a type of space habitat intended as a long-term home for permanent residents.

While at Cambridge, he worked on the structure of vitamin B1 (1933), pepsin (1934), vitamin D2 (1935), the sterols (1936), and the tobacco mosaic virus (1937). It was in his research group in Cambridge that Dorothy Hodgkin started her research. Together, in 1934, they took the first X-ray photographs of hydrated protein crystals. Other prominent scientists who studied with him include Rosalind Franklin, Aaron Klug and Max Perutz.

In 1937, Bernal became Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Political activism

Bernal was a public intellectual, very prominent in political life, particularly in the 1930s after having left the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1933. According to biographer Maurice Goldsmith, he did not so much withdraw from the CPGB, but lost his card and did not renew it. He had joined in 1923.

He attended the famous 1931 meeting on History of Science, where he met the Soviets Nikolai Bukharin and Boris Hessen, who gave an influential Marxist account of the work of Isaac Newton. This meeting fundamentally changed his world-view and he maintained sympathy for the Soviet Union and Stalin. In 1939, Bernal published The Social Function of Science, probably the earliest text on the sociology of science.

On 20 September 1949 the Evening Star newspaper of Ipswich published an interview with Bernal in which he endorsed the "proletarian science" of Trofim Lysenko. The Lysenko affair had erupted in August 1948 when Stalin authorised Lysenko's bogus theory of plant genetics as official Soviet orthodoxy, and refused any deviation.

Bernal and the whole British scientific left were damaged by their support for Lysenko's theory, even after many scientists abandoned their sympathy for the Soviet Union. As a result of the exile and persecution of Russian scientists who refused to toe Stalin’s party line, the British Royal Society severed relations with the Soviet Academy of Sciences in November 1948. Because of his endorsement of Lysenko, in 1949 the US refused to grant Bernal a visa for a visit. The same year the British Association for the Advancement of Science stripped Bernal of his membership. Membership in UK radical science groups quickly declined. Unlike some of his socialist colleagues, Bernal persisted in defending the Soviet position on Lysenko. He publicly refused to accept the gaping fissures that the dispute revealed between the study of natural science and dialectical Marxism.

In November 1950, Picasso, a fellow communist, en-route to a Soviet-sponsored (Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p.181) World Peace Congress in Sheffield created a mural in Bernal's Torrington Square flat. In 2007 this became part of the Wellcome Trust's collection.

Throughout the 1950s, Bernal maintained a faith in the Soviet Union as a vehicle for the creation of a socialist scientific utopia. In 1953 he was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize. From 1959-1965 he was chairman of the World Peace Council.

War work

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Bernal joined the Ministry of Home Security, where he worked with Solly Zuckerman to carry out an important analysis of the effects of enemy bombing. Later in the war he served as scientific adviser to Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Chief of Combined Operations.

A biographer claimed that he was a joint inventor of the Mulberry Harbour. However, controversy developed around Bernal's role in the planning of D-Day, especially in respect to the authenticity of an account given by Bernal of his crossing of the Channel on D-Day plus 1 and 2. Brown provides strong evidence of Bernal's decisive contributions to the preparation and the success of the invasion. Brown states that it was Solly Zuckerman who raised doubts about Bernal's role, despite having earlier collaborated with him on operational matters. Brown cites Zuckerman's character as the main reason for his accusations, although political divergences must have played a role as well.

After helping orchestrate D-Day, Bernal landed at Normandy on D-Day + 1. It was said that a letter of his went astray in early 1944, and this nearly led to the postponement of D-Day. (Source: film account by his younger colleague at Birkbeck College, Professor Alan Mackay FRS, who quoted Bernal on this fact). His extensive knowledge of the area stemmed from a combination of research in English libraries and personal experience, as he had visited the area on previous holidays. The Navy temporarily assigned him the rank of commander so he would not stand out as a civilian amongst the invasion forces. However, the members of his unit were less than convinced as he directed a vehicle using the terms "left" and "right" instead of "port" and "starboard."

Family

His family was of mixed Italian and Spanish/Portuguese Sephardic Jewish origin on his father's side (his grandfather Jacob Genese, properly Ginesi, had adopted the family name Bernal of his paternal grandmother around 1837). His father Samuel Bernal had been raised as a Catholic and his American mother, née Elizabeth Miller, had converted to Catholicism. She was a graduate of Stanford University and a journalist.

Bernal had two children (Mike, b.1926 and Egan, b.1930) with his wife Agnes Eileen Sprague (referred to as Eileen), who was a secretary. He married Sprague on 21 June 1922, the day after having been awarded his BA degree. Bernal was 21, Sprague 23. Sprague was described as an active socialist and their marriage 'open' which they both lived up to 'with great gusto'. He also had a child (Jane, b.1953) with Margot Heinemann. Eileen is mentioned as his widow in 1990.

Bernal also had a long-term professional and, intermittently, intimate relationship with Dorothy Hodgkin, whose scientific research work he mentored.

In the 1930s he became involved in a long-term relationship with the artist Margaret Gardiner, with whom he had a son Martin Bernal, (b.1936) who became a professor of philosophy and author of the controversial Afrocentric work Black Athena. Gardiner always referred to herself as "Mrs. Bernal", though the two never married. She had had a brief relationship about 1920 with Solly Zuckerman. Gardiner was with Bernal in Leningrad when Sergey Kirov, a potential rival to Stalin, was assassinated.

Popular culture

A fictional portrait of Bernal appears in the novel The Search, an early work of his friend C. P. Snow. He was also said to be the inspiration for the character Tengal in The Holiday by Stevie Smith.

Life is a partial, continuous, progressive, multiform and conditionally interactive self-realization of the potentialities of atomic electron states.
—Bernal, MSN Encarta

Works

• The World, the Flesh & the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929) [1]
• Aspects of Dialectical Materialism (1934) with E. F. Carritt, Ralph Fox, Hyman Levy, John Macmurray, R. Page Arnot
• The Social Function of Science (1939)
• Science and the Humanities (1946) pamphlet
• The Freedom of Necessity (1949)
• The Physical Basis of Life (1951)
• Marx and Science (1952) Marxism Today Series No. 9
• Science and Industry in the Nineteenth Century (1953)
• Science in History (1954) four volumes in later editions, The Emergence of Science; The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions; The Natural Sciences in Our Time; The Social Sciences: Conclusions
• World without War (1958)
• A Prospect of Peace (1960)
• Need There Be Need? (1960) pamphlet
• The Origin of Life (1967)
• Emergence of Science (1971)
• The Extension of Man. A History of Physics before 1900 (1972) also as A History of Classical Physics from Antiquity to the Quantum
• On History (1980) with Fernand Braudel
• Engels and Science, Labour Monthly pamphlet
• After Twenty-five Years
• Peace to the World, British Peace Committee pamphlet

References

• John Finch; 'A Nobel Fellow On Every Floor', Medical Research Council 2008, 381 pp, ISBN 978-1840469-40-0; this book is all about the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge.
• The Visible College (1978) Gary Werskey, on Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane, Lancelot Hogben, Hyman Levy and Joseph Needham, 2nd edition 1988
• Swann, Brenda (1999). J D Bernal: A Life in Science and Politics. Verso. ISBN 0 1859 485 40, 97818598485 48. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: ‘Bernal, (John) Desmond (1901–1971)’,by Robert Olby, first published Sept 2004, 2870 words, with portrait illustration
• Mackay, Alan L (2003). "J D Bernal (1901-1971) in perspective". J. Biosci. Vol. 28, no. 5 (published 2003 Sep). pp. 539–46. doi:10.1007/BF02703329. PMID 14517357. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |publication-date= (help)
• Surridge, C (1999). "50 years of biomolecular structure at Birkbeck: Bernal's legacy". Nature Structural Biology. Vol. 6, no. 1 (published 1999 Jan). pp. 13–4. doi:10.1038/4879. PMID 9886283. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |publication-date= (help); More than one of |periodical= and |journal= specified (help)
• Breathnach, C S (1995). "Desmond Bernal and his role in the biological exploitation of X-ray crystallography". Journal of medical biography. Vol. 3, no. 4 (published 1995 Nov). pp. 197–200. PMID 11616361. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |publication-date= (help)
• Bernal, J D (1968). "The relation of microscopic structure to molecular structure". Q. Rev. Biophys. Vol. 1, no. 1 (published 1968 May). pp. 81–7. doi:10.1017/S0033583500000469. PMID 4885734. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |publication-date= (help)
• Bernal, J D (1965). "The structure of water and its biological implications". Symp. Soc. Exp. Biol. Vol. 19. pp. 17–32. PMID 5849048.
• Bernal, J D (1953). "The use of Fourier transforms in protein crystal analysis". Proc. R. Soc. Lond., B, Biol. Sci. Vol. 141, no. 902 (published 1953 Mar 11). pp. 71–85. doi:10.1098/rspb.1953.0022. PMID 13047272. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |publication-date= (help)
• Bernal, J D (1952). "Phase determination in the x-ray diffraction patterns of complex crystals and its application to protein structure". Nature. Vol. 169, no. 4311 (published 1952 Jun 14). pp. 1007–8. doi:10.1038/1691007a0. PMID 14947858. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |publication-date= (help)

See also

• The Bernal Lecture

External links

• 'Bernal and the Social Function of Science' A Masterclass by Chris Freeman, Science Policy Research Unit, Sussex Freeview video provided by the Vega Science Trust.
• R. M. Young 'The Relevance of Bernal's Questions'
• Bernal papers at London School of Economics Archives (relating to his involvement with the peace movement)
• Gary Werskey - The Marxist Critique of Capitalist Science: A History in Three Movements?
• Marxist Writers: John Desmond Bernal
• Roy Johnston, 1999, 'Century of Endeavour: J D Bernal and the Science and Society Theme'