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John Desmond Bernal

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John Desmond Bernal
John Desmond Bernal
John Desmond Bernal
Born 10 May 1901
Nenagh, Co. Tipperary
Died 15 September 1971
London, buried Battersea Cemetery,
Morden (unmarked)[1]
Residence England
Citizenship British
Nationality United Kingdom
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 (b.10 May 1901, Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, Ireland, d. London, 15 September 1971) was an Irish-born British scientist known for pioneering X-ray crystallography.

Contents

[edit] Education and early career

Bernal was the son of a farmer of Italian and Spanish/Portuguese Sephardic Jewish descent.[2] His mother was an American journalist.[3] He was educated at Bedford School near London, and then at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University.[4]

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.[1]

[edit] Career

After graduation, Bernal began research under Sir William Bragg at the Davy Faraday Laboratory at the Royal Institution[3] in London. In 1924 he determined the structure of graphite.[3] He also did work on bronze.[3] 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).[3] 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.

[edit] 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 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.[1] 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.[1][nb 1] 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.[1][nb 2]

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 Lenin Peace Prize.[5] From 1959-1965 he was chairman of the World Peace Council.

[edit] 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 Mountbatten, the Chief of Combined Operations.[3]

A biographer claimed[1] 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[6][7][8] 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."

[edit] Family

His family was of mixed Italian and Spanish/Portuguese[9] 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).[10] 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 with his wife Agnes Eileen Sprague, 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. He also had a child with Margot Heinemann.[1]

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, born in 1937. He was a professor of philosophy and author of the controversial Afrocentric work Black Athena.[11][12] Gardiner always referred to herself as "Mrs. Bernal", though the two never married. She had had a brief relationship about 1920 with Solly Zuckerman.[8]

[edit] 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		 ”

[edit] Works

  • The World, the Flesh & the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929) [2]
  • 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

[edit] Text notes

  1. ^ pp 182 et seq
  2. ^ pp 189 et seq

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Goldsmith, Maurice (1980). "Sage: A Life of J D Bernal". London: Hutchinson. ISBN 0 09 139550. 
  2. ^ Boylan, Henry (1998). A Dictionary of Irish Biography, 3rd Edition. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan. pp. 25. ISBN 0-7171-2945-4. 
  3. ^ a b c d e f A Dictionary of Scientists. Oxford University Press. Oxford: OUP. 1999. ISBN 0-1928-0086-8. 
  4. ^ Boylan, Henry (1998). A Dictionary of Irish Biography, 3rd edition. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan. pp. 25. ISBN 0-7171-2945-4. 
  5. ^ (in Russian) Yearbook of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Moscow: Sovetskaya Enciklopediya. 1959. 
  6. ^ Brown, Andrew (2005). J D Bernal—The Sage of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0 19 851544 8. 
  7. ^ de Charadevian, Soraya, Dept of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge (2006). Advocating Science for the People - review of Andrew Brown's book. Science 12 May 2006 Vol 312, no 5775. pp. 849–850. 
  8. ^ a b "[1] Solly Zuckerman and J D Bernal, Times review by Christopher Coker of both Andrew Brown's biography of Bernal and Bernard Donovan's biography of Zukerman, 8 February 2006]". http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25350-2030656,00.html]. Retrieved on 2008-11-07. 
  9. ^ Bevis Marks Records, Vols 1 - 6 of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Congregation, London; Miriam Rodrigues Pereira, ed.
  10. ^ Hodgkin, Dorothy M. C. (November 1980). "John Desmond Bernal". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 26: p17. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0080-4606%28198011%2926%3C16%3AJDB1M1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I&size=LARGE&origin=JSTOR-enlargePage. Retrieved on 2008-01-04. 
  11. ^ "Margaret Gardiner, obituary in The Guardian, 5 January 2005". http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2005/jan/05/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries. Retrieved on 2008-04-06. 
  12. ^ "Margaret Gardiner, obituary by Nchima Trust". http://www.nchimatrust.org/margaret-gardiner-obituary.htm. Retrieved on 2008-04-06. 

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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