John Desmond Bernal

Infobox Scientist
name = John Desmond Bernal
box_width =


image_width =150px
caption = John Desmond Bernal
birth_date = 10 May 1901
birth_place = Nenagh, County Tipperary
death_date = 15 September 1971
death_place = London, buried Battersea Cemetery,
Morden (unmarked)
residence =
citizenship =
nationality = Irish
field = X-ray crystallography
work_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
author_abbrev_bot =
author_abbrev_zoo =
influences =
influenced =
prizes = Lenin Peace Prize in 1953
religion = None known
footnotes =

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

Career

He was born in Nenagh, County Tipperary, Irelandcite web|title = Nationmaster Encylopaedia|url = http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/John-Desmond-Bernal
accessdate = 2008-10-04] . He was educated at Bedford School near London, and then at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University. 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. After graduating he started research under Sir William Bragg at the Davy-Faraday Laboratory in London. In 1924 he determined the structure of graphite. 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. According to biographer Maurice GoldsmithCite book | author=Goldsmith, Maurice | authorlink= | coauthors= | title="Sage: A Life of J D Bernal" | date=1980 | publisher=Hutchinson | location=London | isbn=0 09 139550| pages=] , 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.

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. 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 BritishAssociation for the Advancement of Science at a meeting on 4 November 1949(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(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 1953cite book|title=Yearbook of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia|year=1959|publisher=Sovetskaya Enciklopediya|location=Moscow|language=Russian] .

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 [Bevis Marks Records, Vols 1 - 6 of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Congregation, London; Miriam Rodrigues Pereira, ed.] 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) ,cite journal
last = Hodgkin
first = Dorothy M. C.
authorlink = Dorothy Hodgkin
date = November 1980
title = John Desmond Bernal
journal = Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society
volume = 26
issue =
pages = p17
quotes = no
issn =
doi =
id =
url = http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0080-4606%28198011%2926%3C16%3AJDB1M1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I&size=LARGE&origin=JSTOR-enlargePage
accessdate = 2008-01-04
month = Nov
year = 1980] 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 [cite web|title = Margaret Gardiner, obituary in The Guardian, 5 January 2005|url = http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2005/jan/05/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries
accessdate = 2008-04-06] [cite web|title = Margaret Gardiner, obituary by Nchima Trust|url = http://www.nchimatrust.org/margaret-gardiner-obituary.htm|accessdate = 2008-04-06] . 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.

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) [http://www.marxists.org/archive/bernal/works/1920s/soul/]
*"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

References

*"The Visible College" (1978) Gary Werskey, on Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane, Lancelot Hogben, Hyman Levy and Joseph Needham, 2nd edition 1988
*cite book
last = Swann
first = Brenda
title = J D Bernal: A Life in Science and Politics
publisher = Verso
location =
series =
year = 1999
isbn = 0 1859 485 40, 97818598485 48
*cite book
last = Brown
first = Andrew
title = J.D. Bernal: The Sage of Science
publisher = Oxford University Press
location =
series =
year = 2005
isbn = 0198515448
*Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: ‘Bernal, (John) Desmond (1901–1971)’,by Robert Olby, first published Sept 2004, 2870 words, with portrait illustration
*Citation
id = PMID:14517357
url= http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14517357
last=Mackay
first=Alan L
publication-date=2003 Sep
year=2003
title=J D Bernal (1901-1971) in perspective
volume=28
issue=5
periodical=J. Biosci.
pages=539–46
*Citation
id = PMID:9886283
url= http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9886283
last=Surridge
first=C
publication-date=1999 Jan
year=1999
title=50 years of biomolecular structure at Birkbeck: Bernal's legacy
volume=6
issue=1
periodical=Nat. Struct. Biol.
pages=13–4
doi = 10.1038/4879
journal=Nature Structural Biology
*Citation
id = PMID:11616361
url= http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11616361
last=Breathnach
first=C S
publication-date=1995 Nov
year=1995
title=Desmond Bernal and his role in the biological exploitation of X-ray crystallography
volume=3
issue=4
periodical=Journal of medical biography
pages=197–200
*Citation
id = PMID:4885734
url= http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4885734
last=Bernal
first=J D
publication-date=1968 May
year=1968
title=The relation of microscopic structure to molecular structure
volume=1
issue=1
periodical=Q. Rev. Biophys.
pages=81–7
*Citation
id = PMID:5849048
url= http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/5849048
last=Bernal
first=J D
publication-date=1965
year=1965
title=The structure of water and its biological implications
volume=19
issue=
periodical=Symp. Soc. Exp. Biol.
pages=17–32
*Citation
id = PMID:13047272
url= http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13047272
last=BERNAL
first=J D
publication-date=1953 Mar 11
year=1953
title=The use of Fournier transforms in protein crystal analysis
volume=141
issue=902
periodical=Proc. R. Soc. Lond., B, Biol. Sci.
pages=71–85
*Citation
id = PMID:14947858
url= http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14947858
last=BERNAL
first=J D
publication-date=1952 Jun 14
year=1952
title=Phase determination in the x-ray diffraction patterns of complex crystals and its application to protein structure
volume=169
issue=4311
periodical=Nature
pages=1007–8

External links

* [http://www.vega.org.uk/video/programme/86 '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.
* [http://human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/paper93h.html R. M. Young " 'The Relevance of Bernal's Qestions' "]
* [http://archives.lse.ac.uk/dserve.exe?dsqServer=lib-4.lse.ac.uk&dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqCmd=overview.tcl&dsqSearch=(RefNo='bernal') Bernal papers at London School of Economics Archives (relating to his involvement with the peace movement)]
* [http://human-nature.com/science-as-culture/werskey.html Gary Werskey - The Marxist Critique of Capitalist Science: A History in Three Movements?]
* [http://www.marxists.org/archive/bernal Marxist Writers: John Desmond Bernal]
* [http://www.iol.ie/~rjtechne/scihist/brnlwhit.htm Roy Johnston, 1999, " 'Century of Endeavour: J D Bernal and the Science and Society Theme' "]
* [http://bibliotraducciones.com/autores/bernal-john-desmond.html Bibliography in Spanish]