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John Desmond Bernal
John Desmond Bernal
John Desmond Bernal
Born 10 May 1901
Nenagh, County Tipperary
Died 15 September 1971
London, buried Battersea Cemetery,
Morden (unmarked)[1]
Nationality Irish
Fields X-ray crystallography
Institutions Birkbeck College, University of London
Alma mater Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Doctoral advisor Sir William Bragg
Doctoral students Dorothy Hodgkin
Known for Science, politics and war work
Notable awards Lenin Peace Prize in 1953
Religious stance None known

John Desmond Bernal FRS (born 10 May 1901, died 15 September 1971) was an Irish-born scientist known for pioneering X-ray crystallography.

Contents

Career

He was born in Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland[2]. He was educated at Bedford School near London, and then at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University[2]. At Cambridge he 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. Also at Cambridge he became known as "Sage", a nickname given to him by a girl working in Ogden's Bookshop at the corner of Bridge Street in about 1920[1]. After graduating he started research under Sir William Bragg at the Davy-Faraday Laboratory in London. In 1924 he determined the structure of graphite[2]. 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 he became Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and later Master.

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[1]. According to biographer Maurice Goldsmith[1], he did not so much withdraw from the CPGB, but lost his card and did not renew it. He had joined in 1923[1].

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.

In 1939, he published The Social Function of Science, probably the earliest text on the sociology of science. He was chairman of the World Peace Council from 1959 until 1965.

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[1]. The Lysenko affair had erupted in August 1948 when Stalin authorised a bogus theory of plant genetics, championed by Lysenko, as official Soviet orthodoxy. It fatally damaged both Bernal and the whole British scientific left. The exile and persecution of Russian scientists who refused to toe Stalin’s party line resulted in the severance of relations between the British Royal Society and the Soviet Academy of Sciences in November 1948.

In 1949 he was refused a visa for a US visit and in the same year he was stripped of his membership of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at a meeting on 4 November 1949[1](pp 182 et seq). Membership of UK radical science groups quickly declined. Unlike some of his socialist colleagues, Bernal defended the Soviet position on Lysenko and refused publicly to accept the fissures the dispute revealed between natural science and dialectical Marxism[1](pp 189 et seq).

Throughout the 1950s, Bernal maintained this faith in the Soviet Union as a vehicle for the creation of a socialist scientific utopia. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1953[3].

War work

He was a joint inventor of the Mulberry Harbour.

After helping orchestrate D-Day, Bernal landed on 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 having visited the area on previous holidays. The Navy had temporarily assigned him the rank of commander such that he wouldn't 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."

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.

Family

His family was of mixed Italian and Spanish/Portuguese [4]Sephardic Jewish origin on his father's side (his grandfather Jacob Genese, properly Ginesi having adopted the family name Bernal of his paternal grandmother around 1837) ,[5] though his father Samuel was a Catholic; his mother, nee Elizabeth Miller, was an American Catholic convert, a graduate of Stanford University and a journalist.

Martin Bernal, author of Black Athena, is his son with Margaret Gardiner[6][7]. Gardiner always referred to herself as "Mrs Bernal". He had three other children, two with Agnes Eileen Sprague, a secretary, and one with Margot Heinemann. His only marriage was to Sprague whom he married on 21 June 1922, the day after being awarded his BA degree. Bernal was 21, Sprague 23[1].

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

Trivia: A fictional portrait of him appears in the novel The Search, an early work of his friend C. P. Snow, and another ("Tengal") in The Holiday by Stevie Smith.

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

Quotation

  • "Life is a partial, continuous, progressive, multiform and conditionally interactive self-realization of the potentialities of atomic electron states." (Quote from Bernal on MSN Encarta)

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Goldsmith, Maurice (1980). "Sage: A Life of J D Bernal". London: Hutchinson. ISBN 0 09 139550. 
  2. ^ a b c "Nationmaster Encylopaedia". Retrieved on 2008-10-04.
  3. ^ (1959) Yearbook of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (in Russian). Moscow: Sovetskaya Enciklopediya. 
  4. ^ Bevis Marks Records, Vols 1 - 6 of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Congregation, London; Miriam Rodrigues Pereira, ed.
  5. ^ Hodgkin, Dorothy M. C. (November 1980). John Desmond Bernal. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 26: p17. Retrieved on 2008-01-04. 
  6. ^ "Margaret Gardiner, obituary in The Guardian, 5 January 2005". Retrieved on 2008-04-06.
  7. ^ "Margaret Gardiner, obituary by Nchima Trust". Retrieved on 2008-04-06.

References

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