J. D. Bernal
Encyclopedia
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, called "Sage" by his friends, and known for pioneering X-ray crystallography
in molecular biology
.
in Limerick
and after graduating from Albert Agricultural College spent 14 years in Australia before returning to Tipperary
to buy a farm Brookwatson near Nenagh
where Bernal was brought up. His American mother, née Elizabeth Miller, whose mother was from Antrim
, was a graduate of Stanford University
and a journalist and had converted to Catholicism.
Bernal was educated in England first, for one term, at Stonyhurst College
which he hated. 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' and Brown claims "he seemed to adjust easily to life" there. In 1919 he went to Emmanuel College, Cambridge University
with a 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 group
s, including the quaternion
method; this became the mathematical basis of a lengthy paper on crystal structure
for which he won a joint prize with Ronald G.W. Norrish in his third year. Whilst at Cambridge he also became known as "Sage", a nickname given to him about 1920 by a young woman working in C. K. Ogden's Bookshop at the corner of Bridge Street
.
in London. In 1924 he determined the structure of graphite
and also did work on the crystal structure of bronze
. His strength was in analysis as much as experimental method, and his mathematical and practical treatment of determining crystal structure was widely studied, though he also developed an X-ray spectro-goniometer
.
In 1927 he was appointed as the first lecturer in Structural Crystallography at Cambridge, becoming the assistant director of the Cavendish Laboratory
in 1934. Here he started applying his crystallographic techniques to organic molecules, starting with oestrin and sterol compounds including cholesterol
in 1929, forcing a radical change of thinking among sterol chemists. While at Cambridge, he analysed vitamin B1 (1933), pepsin
(1934), vitamin D2 (1935), the sterols (1936), and the tobacco mosaic virus
(1937). He also worked on the structure of liquid water, showing the boomerang shape of its molecule (1933). 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 using the trick of bathing the crystals in their mother liquor, giving one of the first glimpses of the world of molecular structure that underlies living things. Max Perutz
arrived as a student from Vienna
in 1936 and started the work on haemoglobin that would occupy him most of his career.
However, Bernal was refused fellowships at Emmanuel and Christ's and tenure by Rutherford
, who disliked him, and in 1937, Bernal became Professor of Physics
at Birkbeck College, University of London
, a department which had been brought to the first rank by Patrick Blackett. The same year he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. After the second world war he established Birkbeck's Biomolecular Research Laboratory in two Georgian houses in Torrington Square with 15 researchers. Aaron Klug
worked on ribonuclease
whilst Andrew Booth
developed some of the earliest computers to help with the computation. Rosalind Franklin
joined from King's College and did pioneering work on viruses until her early death in 1957.
His Guthrie lecture of 1947 concentrated on proteins as the basis of life, but it was Perutz, still at Cambridge, who picked up Linus Pauling
's leads. In the early '60s, Bernal returned to the subject of the origin of life - analysing meteorites for evidence of complex molecules - and to the topic of the structure of liquids, which he talked about in his Bakerian lecture
in 1962.
changed that. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Bernal joined the Ministry of Home Security
, where he brought in Solly Zuckerman
to carry out the first proper analyses of the effects of enemy bombing and of explosions on animals and people. Their subsequent analysis of the effects of bombs on Birmingham
and Hull
showed that city bombing produced little disruption and production was only affected by direct hits on factories. A supper of scientists in Soho
generated a multi-author book Science in War produced in a month by Allen Lane
, one of the guests, arguing that science should be applied in every part of the war effort.
From 1942 he and Zuckerman served as scientific advisers to Lord Louis Mountbatten
, the Chief of Combined Operations. Bernal was able to argue on both sides of Project Habbakuk, Pyke's
proposal to build huge aircraft landing platforms in the North Atlantic made of ice. He rescued Max Perutz from internment, getting him to perform experiments in a meat store freezer below Smithfield Meat Market. This project indirectly marked his divergence from Zuckerman, when he was recalled from a joint tour of the Middle East investigating the cooperation of army and air force, although the tour established Zuckerman's reputation as a military scientist.
, Bernal was determined that these mistakes not be repeated in Operation Overlord
, and demonstrated the advantages of an artificial harbour to the participants of the Quebec Conference
in 1943 as the only British scientist present. But his main contribution to the Normandy landings was the detailed mapping of the beaches which had to be done without attracting any German attention. His extensive knowledge of the area stemmed from a combination of research in English libraries and personal experience (he had visited Arromanches on previous holidays) combined with the results of aerial surveys that had to spread over much of France.
At Bernal's memorial service, Zuckerman controversially downplayed Bernal's part in the Normandy landings saying that he was not cleared for the highest levels of security. Given Bernal's Marxist and pro-Soviet sympathies it is perhaps remarkable that there has never been any suggestion that he fed any information in that direction. But Brown provides strong evidence of Bernal's decisive contributions to the preparation and the success of the invasion.
After helping orchestrate D-Day
with work on the structure of the proposed landing sites as well as the bocage
countryside beyond, Bernal landed, according to C. P. Snow
, at Normandy
on the afternoon of D-Day+1 in the uniform of an Instructor-Lieutenant RN
to record the effectiveness of the plans. He also assisted boats floundering on the rocks using his knowledge of the area but said: I committed the frightful solecism
of not knowing which was port and which side was starboard".
. It is famous for having been the first to propose the so-called Bernal sphere
, a type of space habitat
intended for permanent residence. The second chapter explores radical changes to human bodies and intelligence and the third discusses the impact of these on society.
In The Social Function of Science (1939) he argued that science was not an individual pursuit of abstract knowledge and that the support of research and development should be dramatically increased. Eugene Garfield
, originator of the Science Citation Index
, said "his idea of a centralized reprint center was in my thoughts when I first proposed the as yet nonexistent SCI in Science in 1955."
Science in History
(1954) is a monumental four-volume attempt to analyse the interaction between science and society. The Origin of Life (1967) gives the current ideas from Oparin and Haldane
onwards.
(CPGB) in 1923. His membership evidently lapsed when he returned to Cambridge in 1927 and was not renewed until 1933, and he may have lost his card again shortly after this.
Bernal became a prominent intellectual
in political life, particularly in the 1930s. He attended the famous 1931 meeting on the 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 Joseph Stalin
. In 1939, Bernal published The Social Function of Science, probably the earliest text on the sociology of science.
After the second world war, although Bernal had been involved in evaluating the effects of atomic attacks against the Soviet Union, he supported the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace at their congress in Poland in 1948. Afterwards, he wrote a letter to the New Statesman warning that the US was preparing "a war for complete world domination". Consequently, when Bernal was invited to a world peace conference in New York in February 1949, his visa was refused. But he was allowed into France in April for the World Congress of the Partisans of Peace, with Joliot-Curie
as president and Bernal as vice-president. The following year the organisation changed its name to the World Peace Council
.
On 20 September 1949, after his return from giving a speech strongly critical of western countries at a peace conference in Moscow, the Evening Star
newspaper of Ipswich
published an interview with Bernal in which he endorsed Soviet agriculture, 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 his support for Lysenko's theory, even after many scientists abandoned their sympathy for the Soviet Union.
Under pressure from the burgeoning Cold War
, the president of British Royal Society had resigned from the Soviet Academy of Sciences in November 1948. In November 1949, the British Association for the Advancement of Science removed Bernal from membership of its council. 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, Pablo Picasso
, a fellow communist, en-route to a Soviet-sponsored World Peace Congress in Sheffield created a mural in Bernal's flat at the top of No.22 Torrington Square
. In 2007 this became part of the Wellcome Trust's collection
for £250,000.
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 president of the World Peace Council
.
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 1937) who became a professor of philosophy and author of the controversial Afrocentric work Black Athena
. She had had a brief relationship about 1920 with Solly Zuckerman. Gardiner referred to herself as "Mrs. Bernal", though the two never married. Eileen is mentioned as his widow in 1990.
He also had a child (Jane, b.1953) with Margot Heinemann
and had a brief intimate relationship with Dorothy Hodgkin, whose scientific research work he mentored.
. He was also said to be the inspiration for the character Tengal in The Holiday by Stevie Smith
.
Nenagh
Nenagh is the county town of North Tipperary in Ireland. It is the administrative centre of North Tipperary and in 2011 it had a recorded population of 7,995. It is a civil parish in the historical barony of Ormond Lower...
, Co. Tipperary
County Tipperary
County Tipperary is a county of Ireland. It is located in the province of Munster and is named after the town of Tipperary. The area of the county does not have a single local authority; local government is split between two authorities. In North Tipperary, part of the Mid-West Region, local...
, Ireland
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
, d. London, 15 September 1971) was one of Britain’s best known and most controversial scientists, called "Sage" by his friends, and known for pioneering X-ray crystallography
X-ray crystallography
X-ray crystallography is a method of determining the arrangement of atoms within a crystal, in which a beam of X-rays strikes a crystal and causes the beam of light to spread into many specific directions. From the angles and intensities of these diffracted beams, a crystallographer can produce a...
in molecular biology
Molecular biology
Molecular biology is the branch of biology that deals with the molecular basis of biological activity. This field overlaps with other areas of biology and chemistry, particularly genetics and biochemistry...
.
Origin and education
His family was Irish, 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 CatholicCatholic
The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...
in Limerick
Limerick
Limerick is the third largest city in the Republic of Ireland, and the principal city of County Limerick and Ireland's Mid-West Region. It is the fifth most populous city in all of Ireland. When taking the extra-municipal suburbs into account, Limerick is the third largest conurbation in the...
and after graduating from Albert Agricultural College spent 14 years in Australia before returning to Tipperary
Tipperary
Tipperary is a town and a civil parish in South Tipperary in Ireland. Its population was 4,415 at the 2006 census. It is also an ecclesiastical parish in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Cashel and Emly, and is in the historical barony of Clanwilliam....
to buy a farm Brookwatson near Nenagh
Nenagh
Nenagh is the county town of North Tipperary in Ireland. It is the administrative centre of North Tipperary and in 2011 it had a recorded population of 7,995. It is a civil parish in the historical barony of Ormond Lower...
where Bernal was brought up. His American mother, née Elizabeth Miller, whose mother was from Antrim
Antrim, County Antrim
Antrim is a town in County Antrim in the northeast of Northern Ireland, on the banks of the Six Mile Water, half a mile north-east of Lough Neagh. It had a population of 20,001 people in the 2001 Census. The town is the administrative centre of Antrim Borough Council...
, was a graduate of Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
and a journalist and had converted to Catholicism.
Bernal was educated in England first, for one term, at Stonyhurst College
Stonyhurst College
Stonyhurst College is a Roman Catholic independent school, adhering to the Jesuit tradition. It is located on the Stonyhurst Estate near the village of Hurst Green in the Ribble Valley area of Lancashire, England, and occupies a Grade I listed building...
which he hated. Because of this he was moved to Bedford School
Bedford School
Bedford School is not to be confused with Bedford Modern School or Bedford High School or Old Bedford School in Bedford, TexasBedford School is an HMC independent school for boys located in the town of Bedford, England, United Kingdom...
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' and Brown claims "he seemed to adjust easily to life" there. In 1919 he went to Emmanuel College, Cambridge University
Emmanuel College, Cambridge
Emmanuel College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge.The college was founded in 1584 by Sir Walter Mildmay on the site of a Dominican friary...
with a scholarship.
At Cambridge Bernal studied both mathematics and science for a BA
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
degree in 1922, which he followed by another year of natural sciences. He taught himself the theory of space group
Space group
In mathematics and geometry, a space group is a symmetry group, usually for three dimensions, that divides space into discrete repeatable domains.In three dimensions, there are 219 unique types, or counted as 230 if chiral copies are considered distinct...
s, including the quaternion
Quaternion
In mathematics, the quaternions are a number system that extends the complex numbers. They were first described by Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton in 1843 and applied to mechanics in three-dimensional space...
method; this became the mathematical basis of a lengthy paper on crystal structure
Crystal structure
In mineralogy and crystallography, crystal structure is a unique arrangement of atoms or molecules in a crystalline liquid or solid. A crystal structure is composed of a pattern, a set of atoms arranged in a particular way, and a lattice exhibiting long-range order and symmetry...
for which he won a joint prize with Ronald G.W. Norrish in his third year. Whilst at Cambridge he also became known as "Sage", a nickname given to him about 1920 by a young woman working in C. K. Ogden's Bookshop at the corner of Bridge Street
Bridge Street, Cambridge
Bridge Street is a historic street in the north of central Cambridge, England. It runs between Magdalene Street at the junction with Thompson's Lane to the northwest and Sidney Street at the junction with Jesus Lane to the southeast...
.
Scientific career
After graduation, Bernal began research under Sir William Bragg at the Davy Faraday Laboratory at the Royal InstitutionRoyal Institution
The Royal Institution of Great Britain is an organization devoted to scientific education and research, based in London.-Overview:...
in London. In 1924 he determined the structure of graphite
Graphite
The mineral graphite is one of the allotropes of carbon. It was named by Abraham Gottlob Werner in 1789 from the Ancient Greek γράφω , "to draw/write", for its use in pencils, where it is commonly called lead . Unlike diamond , graphite is an electrical conductor, a semimetal...
and also did work on the crystal structure of bronze
Bronze
Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive. It is hard and brittle, and it was particularly significant in antiquity, so much so that the Bronze Age was named after the metal...
. His strength was in analysis as much as experimental method, and his mathematical and practical treatment of determining crystal structure was widely studied, though he also developed an X-ray spectro-goniometer
Goniometer
A goniometer is an instrument that either measures an angle or allows an object to be rotated to a precise angular position. The term goniometry is derived from two Greek words, gōnia, meaning angle, and metron, meaning measure....
.
In 1927 he was appointed as the first lecturer in Structural Crystallography at Cambridge, becoming the assistant director of the Cavendish Laboratory
Cavendish Laboratory
The Cavendish Laboratory is the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, and is part of the university's School of Physical Sciences. It was opened in 1874 as a teaching laboratory....
in 1934. Here he started applying his crystallographic techniques to organic molecules, starting with oestrin and sterol compounds including cholesterol
Cholesterol
Cholesterol is a complex isoprenoid. Specifically, it is a waxy steroid of fat that is produced in the liver or intestines. It is used to produce hormones and cell membranes and is transported in the blood plasma of all mammals. It is an essential structural component of mammalian cell membranes...
in 1929, forcing a radical change of thinking among sterol chemists. While at Cambridge, he analysed vitamin B1 (1933), pepsin
Pepsin
Pepsin is an enzyme whose precursor form is released by the chief cells in the stomach and that degrades food proteins into peptides. It was discovered in 1836 by Theodor Schwann who also coined its name from the Greek word pepsis, meaning digestion...
(1934), vitamin D2 (1935), the sterols (1936), and the tobacco mosaic virus
Tobacco mosaic virus
Tobacco mosaic virus is a positive-sense single stranded RNA virus that infects plants, especially tobacco and other members of the family Solanaceae. The infection causes characteristic patterns on the leaves . TMV was the first virus to be discovered...
(1937). He also worked on the structure of liquid water, showing the boomerang shape of its molecule (1933). It was in his research group in Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
that Dorothy Hodgkin started her research. Together, in 1934, they took the first X-ray photographs of hydrated protein crystals using the trick of bathing the crystals in their mother liquor, giving one of the first glimpses of the world of molecular structure that underlies living things. Max Perutz
Max Perutz
Max Ferdinand Perutz, OM, CH, CBE, FRS was an Austrian-born British molecular biologist, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with John Kendrew, for their studies of the structures of hemoglobin and globular proteins...
arrived as a student from Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
in 1936 and started the work on haemoglobin that would occupy him most of his career.
However, Bernal was refused fellowships at Emmanuel and Christ's and tenure by Rutherford
Ernest Rutherford
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson OM, FRS was a New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics...
, who disliked him, and in 1937, Bernal became Professor of Physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
at Birkbeck College, University of London
Birkbeck, University of London
Birkbeck, University of London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London. It offers many Master's and Bachelor's degree programmes that can be studied either part-time or full-time, though nearly all teaching is...
, a department which had been brought to the first rank by Patrick Blackett. The same year he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. After the second world war he established Birkbeck's Biomolecular Research Laboratory in two Georgian houses in Torrington Square with 15 researchers. Aaron Klug
Aaron Klug
Sir Aaron Klug, OM, PRS is a Lithuanian-born British chemist and biophysicist, and winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.-Biography:Klug was...
worked on ribonuclease
Ribonuclease
Ribonuclease is a type of nuclease that catalyzes the degradation of RNA into smaller components. Ribonucleases can be divided into endoribonucleases and exoribonucleases, and comprise several sub-classes within the EC 2.7 and 3.1 classes of enzymes.-Function:All organisms studied contain...
whilst Andrew Booth
Andrew Donald Booth
Andrew Donald Booth was a British electrical engineer, physicist and computer scientist who led the invention of the magnetic drum memory for computers and invented Booth's multiplication algorithm....
developed some of the earliest computers to help with the computation. Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Elsie Franklin was a British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer who made critical contributions to the understanding of the fine molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal and graphite...
joined from King's College and did pioneering work on viruses until her early death in 1957.
His Guthrie lecture of 1947 concentrated on proteins as the basis of life, but it was Perutz, still at Cambridge, who picked up Linus Pauling
Linus Pauling
Linus Carl Pauling was an American chemist, biochemist, peace activist, author, and educator. He was one of the most influential chemists in history and ranks among the most important scientists of the 20th century...
's leads. In the early '60s, Bernal returned to the subject of the origin of life - analysing meteorites for evidence of complex molecules - and to the topic of the structure of liquids, which he talked about in his Bakerian lecture
Bakerian Lecture
The Bakerian Lecture is a prize lecture of the Royal Society, a lecture on physical sciences.In 1775 Henry Baker left £100 for a spoken lecture by a Fellow on such part of natural history or experimental philosophy as the Society shall determine....
in 1962.
War work
In the early thirties Bernal had been arguing for peace, but the Spanish civil warSpanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
changed that. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Bernal joined the Ministry of Home Security
Ministry of Home Security
The Ministry of Home Security was a British government department established in 1939 to direct national civil defence during the Second World War.-Background:...
, where he brought in Solly Zuckerman
Solly Zuckerman
Solly Zuckerman, Baron Zuckerman, OM, KCB, FRS was a British public servant, zoologist, and scientific advisor who is best remembered as an advisor to the Allies on bombing strategy in World War II, for his work to advance the cause of nuclear non-proliferation, and for his role in bringing...
to carry out the first proper analyses of the effects of enemy bombing and of explosions on animals and people. Their subsequent analysis of the effects of bombs on Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
and Hull
Kingston upon Hull
Kingston upon Hull , usually referred to as Hull, is a city and unitary authority area in the ceremonial county of the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It stands on the River Hull at its junction with the Humber estuary, 25 miles inland from the North Sea. Hull has a resident population of...
showed that city bombing produced little disruption and production was only affected by direct hits on factories. A supper of scientists in Soho
Soho
Soho is an area of the City of Westminster and part of the West End of London. Long established as an entertainment district, for much of the 20th century Soho had a reputation for sex shops as well as night life and film industry. Since the early 1980s, the area has undergone considerable...
generated a multi-author book Science in War produced in a month by Allen Lane
Allen Lane
Sir Allen Lane was a British publisher who founded Penguin Books, bringing high quality paperback fiction and non-fiction to the mass market.-Early life and family:...
, one of the guests, arguing that science should be applied in every part of the war effort.
From 1942 he and Zuckerman served as scientific advisers to Lord Louis Mountbatten
Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma
Admiral of the Fleet Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas George Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, KG, GCB, OM, GCSI, GCIE, GCVO, DSO, PC, FRS , was a British statesman and naval officer, and an uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh...
, the Chief of Combined Operations. Bernal was able to argue on both sides of Project Habbakuk, Pyke's
Geoffrey Pyke
Geoffrey Nathaniel Joseph Pyke was an English journalist, educationalist, and later an inventor whose clever, but unorthodox, ideas could be difficult to implement...
proposal to build huge aircraft landing platforms in the North Atlantic made of ice. He rescued Max Perutz from internment, getting him to perform experiments in a meat store freezer below Smithfield Meat Market. This project indirectly marked his divergence from Zuckerman, when he was recalled from a joint tour of the Middle East investigating the cooperation of army and air force, although the tour established Zuckerman's reputation as a military scientist.
Operation Overlord and D-Day
After the disaster of the Dieppe raidDieppe Raid
The Dieppe Raid, also known as the Battle of Dieppe, Operation Rutter or later on Operation Jubilee, during the Second World War, was an Allied attack on the German-occupied port of Dieppe on the northern coast of France on 19 August 1942. The assault began at 5:00 AM and by 10:50 AM the Allied...
, Bernal was determined that these mistakes not be repeated in Operation Overlord
Operation Overlord
Operation Overlord was the code name for the Battle of Normandy, the operation that launched the invasion of German-occupied western Europe during World War II by Allied forces. The operation commenced on 6 June 1944 with the Normandy landings...
, and demonstrated the advantages of an artificial harbour to the participants of the Quebec Conference
Quebec Conference
Quebec Conference refers to one of several different meetings by the same name that were held in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada:*The Quebec Conference, 1864, the second conference to discuss Canada's confederation, which was finally accomplished three years later...
in 1943 as the only British scientist present. But his main contribution to the Normandy landings was the detailed mapping of the beaches which had to be done without attracting any German attention. His extensive knowledge of the area stemmed from a combination of research in English libraries and personal experience (he had visited Arromanches on previous holidays) combined with the results of aerial surveys that had to spread over much of France.
At Bernal's memorial service, Zuckerman controversially downplayed Bernal's part in the Normandy landings saying that he was not cleared for the highest levels of security. Given Bernal's Marxist and pro-Soviet sympathies it is perhaps remarkable that there has never been any suggestion that he fed any information in that direction. But Brown provides strong evidence of Bernal's decisive contributions to the preparation and the success of the invasion.
After helping orchestrate D-Day
D-Day
D-Day is a term often used in military parlance to denote the day on which a combat attack or operation is to be initiated. "D-Day" often represents a variable, designating the day upon which some significant event will occur or has occurred; see Military designation of days and hours for similar...
with work on the structure of the proposed landing sites as well as the bocage
Bocage
Bocage is a Norman word which has entered both the French and English languages. It may refer to a small forest, a decorative element of leaves, a terrain of mixed woodland and pasture, or a type of rubble-work, comparable with the English use of 'rustic' in relation to garden...
countryside beyond, Bernal landed, according to C. P. Snow
C. P. Snow
Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow of the City of Leicester CBE was an English physicist and novelist who also served in several important positions with the UK government...
, at Normandy
Normandy
Normandy is a geographical region corresponding to the former Duchy of Normandy. It is in France.The continental territory covers 30,627 km² and forms the preponderant part of Normandy and roughly 5% of the territory of France. It is divided for administrative purposes into two régions:...
on the afternoon of D-Day+1 in the uniform of an Instructor-Lieutenant RN
Royal Navy
The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...
to record the effectiveness of the plans. He also assisted boats floundering on the rocks using his knowledge of the area but said: I committed the frightful solecism
Solecism
In traditional prescriptive grammar, a solecism is something perceived as a grammatical mistake or absurdity, or even a simply non-standard usage. The word was originally used by the Greeks for what they perceived as mistakes in their language...
of not knowing which was port and which side was starboard".
Writing
His 1929 work The World, the Flesh and the Devil has been called "the most brilliant attempt at scientific prediction ever made" by Arthur C. ClarkeArthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein,...
. It is famous for having been the first to propose the so-called Bernal sphere
Bernal sphere
A Bernal sphere is a type of space habitat intended as a long-term home for permanent residents, first proposed in 1929 by John Desmond Bernal....
, a type of space habitat
Space colonization
Space colonization is the concept of permanent human habitation outside of Earth. Although hypothetical at the present time, there are many proposals and speculations about the first space colony...
intended for permanent residence. The second chapter explores radical changes to human bodies and intelligence and the third discusses the impact of these on society.
In The Social Function of Science (1939) he argued that science was not an individual pursuit of abstract knowledge and that the support of research and development should be dramatically increased. Eugene Garfield
Eugene Garfield
Eugene "Gene" Garfield is an American scientist, one of the founders of bibliometrics and scientometrics. He received a PhD in Structural Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1961. Dr. Garfield was the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information , which was located in...
, originator of the Science Citation Index
Science Citation Index
The Science Citation Index is a citation index originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information and created by Eugene Garfield in 1960, which is now owned by Thomson Reuters. The larger version covers more than 6,500 notable and significant journals, across 150 disciplines, from ...
, said "his idea of a centralized reprint center was in my thoughts when I first proposed the as yet nonexistent SCI in Science in 1955."
Science in History
Science in History
Science in History is a four-volume book by scientist and historian John Desmond Bernal published in 1954. It was the first full attempt to analyse the reciprocal relations of science and society throughout history.*Volume 1: The Emergence of Science...
(1954) is a monumental four-volume attempt to analyse the interaction between science and society. The Origin of Life (1967) gives the current ideas from Oparin and Haldane
J. B. S. Haldane
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS , known as Jack , was a British-born geneticist and evolutionary biologist. A staunch Marxist, he was critical of Britain's role in the Suez Crisis, and chose to leave Oxford and moved to India and became an Indian citizen...
onwards.
Political activism
Arriving in Cambridge as a Catholic, Bernal became a socialist as a result of a long night arguing with a friend. As one reviewer says, "This conversion, as complete as St. Paul’s on the road to Damascus, goes some way to account for, but not excuse, Bernal’s blind allegiance for the rest of his life, to the Soviet Union." He joined the Communist Party of Great BritainCommunist Party of Great Britain
The Communist Party of Great Britain was the largest communist party in Great Britain, although it never became a mass party like those in France and Italy. It existed from 1920 to 1991.-Formation:...
(CPGB) in 1923. His membership evidently lapsed when he returned to Cambridge in 1927 and was not renewed until 1933, and he may have lost his card again shortly after this.
Bernal became a prominent intellectual
Intellectual
An intellectual is a person who uses intelligence and critical or analytical reasoning in either a professional or a personal capacity.- Terminology and endeavours :"Intellectual" can denote four types of persons:...
in political life, particularly in the 1930s. He attended the famous 1931 meeting on the history of science
History of science
The history of science is the study of the historical development of human understandings of the natural world and the domains of the social sciences....
, where he met the Soviets Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , was a Russian Marxist, Bolshevik revolutionary, and Soviet politician. He was a member of the Politburo and Central Committee , chairman of the Communist International , and the editor in chief of Pravda , the journal Bolshevik , Izvestia , and the Great Soviet...
, and Boris Hessen
Boris Hessen
Boris Mikhailovich Hessen , also Gessen was a Soviet physicist, philosopher and historian of science...
who gave an influential Marxist account of the work of Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...
. This meeting fundamentally changed his world-view and he maintained sympathy for the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
. In 1939, Bernal published The Social Function of Science, probably the earliest text on the sociology of science.
After the second world war, although Bernal had been involved in evaluating the effects of atomic attacks against the Soviet Union, he supported the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace at their congress in Poland in 1948. Afterwards, he wrote a letter to the New Statesman warning that the US was preparing "a war for complete world domination". Consequently, when Bernal was invited to a world peace conference in New York in February 1949, his visa was refused. But he was allowed into France in April for the World Congress of the Partisans of Peace, with Joliot-Curie
Joliot-Curie
Joliot-Curie may refer to more than one person:* Frédéric Joliot-Curie- a French physicist and Nobel prize-winner* Irène Joliot-Curie - his wife and joint prize-winner with her husband...
as president and Bernal as vice-president. The following year the organisation changed its name to the World Peace Council
World Peace Council
The World Peace Council is an international organization that advocates universal disarmament, sovereignty and independence and peaceful co-existence, and campaigns against imperialism, weapons of mass destruction and all forms of discrimination...
.
On 20 September 1949, after his return from giving a speech strongly critical of western countries at a peace conference in Moscow, the Evening Star
Evening Star (Ipswich)
The Evening Star is a daily evening local newspaper based in Ipswich.The newspaper started publication on 17 February 1885 and was known as The Star of the East until 1893....
newspaper of Ipswich
Ipswich
Ipswich is a large town and a non-metropolitan district. It is the county town of Suffolk, England. Ipswich is located on the estuary of the River Orwell...
published an interview with Bernal in which he endorsed Soviet agriculture, the "proletarian science" of Trofim Lysenko
Trofim Lysenko
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist of Ukrainian origin, who was director of Soviet biology under Joseph Stalin. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of the hybridization theories of Russian horticulturist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, and adopted them into a powerful...
. 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 his support for Lysenko's theory, even after many scientists abandoned their sympathy for the Soviet Union.
Under pressure from the burgeoning Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
, the president of British Royal Society had resigned from the Soviet Academy of Sciences in November 1948. In November 1949, the British Association for the Advancement of Science removed Bernal from membership of its council. 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, Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
, a fellow communist, en-route to a Soviet-sponsored World Peace Congress in Sheffield created a mural in Bernal's flat at the top of No.22 Torrington Square
Torrington Square
Torrington Square is a square in Bloomsbury, owned by the University of London, located in central London, England. Today it is a square in name only, most of the houses having been demolished by the university. Birkbeck College and the School of Oriental and African Studies are located here. To...
. In 2007 this became part of the Wellcome Trust's collection
Wellcome Collection
The Wellcome Collection is a museum at 183 Euston Road, London, displaying an unusual mixture of medical artifacts and original artworks exploring 'ideas about the connections between medicine, life and art'. The Collection comprises three public exhibition spaces, an auditorium, events space, cafe...
for £250,000.
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 president of the World Peace Council
World Peace Council
The World Peace Council is an international organization that advocates universal disarmament, sovereignty and independence and peaceful co-existence, and campaigns against imperialism, weapons of mass destruction and all forms of discrimination...
.
Family
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'.In the 1930s he became involved in a long-term relationship with the artist Margaret Gardiner
Margaret Gardiner (artist)
Margaret Gardiner was a radical modern British artist and resident of Hampstead, London, from 1932, where she was also a left wing political activist. She was also for a time the partner of Professor John Desmond Bernal the eminent scientist and political activist...
, with whom he had a son Martin Bernal
Martin Bernal
Martin Gardiner Bernal is a Professor Emeritus of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. He is a scholar of modern Chinese political history...
, (born 1937) who became a professor of philosophy and author of the controversial Afrocentric work Black Athena
Black Athena
Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization is a highly controversial three-volume work by Martin Bernal. He discusses Ancient Greece in a new light. Bernal's thesis discusses the perception of ancient Greece in relation to Greece's African and Asiatic neighbors, which he...
. She had had a brief relationship about 1920 with Solly Zuckerman. Gardiner referred to herself as "Mrs. Bernal", though the two never married. Eileen is mentioned as his widow in 1990.
He also had a child (Jane, b.1953) with Margot Heinemann
Margot Heinemann
Margot Claire Heinemann was a British Marxist writer, drama scholar, and leading member of the Communist Party of Great Britain ....
and had a brief intimate relationship with Dorothy Hodgkin, whose scientific research work he mentored.
Popular culture
A fictional portrait of Bernal appears in the novel The Search, an early work of his friend C. P. SnowC. P. Snow
Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow of the City of Leicester CBE was an English physicist and novelist who also served in several important positions with the UK government...
. He was also said to be the inspiration for the character Tengal in The Holiday by Stevie Smith
Stevie Smith
Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith was an English poet and novelist.-Life:Stevie Smith, born Florence Margaret Smith in Kingston upon Hull, was the second daughter of Ethel and Charles Smith. Contemporary Women Poets...
.
Works
- The World, the Flesh & the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929) Jonathan Cape.
- Aspects of Dialectical Materialism (1934) with E. F. Carritt, Ralph FoxRalph FoxRalph Hartzler Fox was an American mathematician. As a professor at Princeton University, he taught and advised many of the contributors to the Golden Age of differential topology, and he played an important role in the modernization and main-streaming of knot theory.Ralph Fox attended Swarthmore...
, Hyman LevyHyman LevyHyman Levy was a Scottish philosopher, mathematician and political activist.The son of Minna Cohen and Marcus Levy, a Jewish art dealer in Edinburgh, Hyman was the third oldest of eight children. He went to school at George Heriot's School, and was the School Dux. Thanks to scholarships, he was...
, John MacmurrayJohn MacmurrayJohn Macmurray MC was a Scottish philosopher. His thought moved beyond the modern tradition begun by Descartes and continued in Britain by Locke, Berkeley and Hume. He made contributions in the fields of political science, religion, and philosophy of education in a long career of writing,...
, R. Page Arnot - The Social Function of Science (1939) Faber & Faber
- 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) Routledge.
- http://books.google.com/books?id=k54SAQAAIAAJScience in HistoryScience in HistoryScience in History is a four-volume book by scientist and historian John Desmond Bernal published in 1954. It was the first full attempt to analyse the reciprocal relations of science and society throughout history.*Volume 1: The Emergence of Science...
] (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. Faber & Faber - 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) M.I.T. Press also as A History of Classical Physics from Antiquity to the Quantum
- On History (1980) with Fernand BraudelFernand BraudelFernand Braudel was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects, each representing several decades of intense study: The Mediterranean , Civilization and Capitalism , and the unfinished Identity of France...
- Engels and Science, Labour Monthly pamphlet
- After Twenty-five Years
- Peace to the World, British Peace Committee pamphlet
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 (Free versions of some of his writings.)
- Roy Johnston, 1999, 'Century of Endeavour: J D Bernal and the Science and Society Theme'