John
Bernal was born in Nenagh, Ireland,
in 1901. He was educated at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire and Emmanuel
College, Cambridge.
In
1923 Bernal joined the Communist Party.
Greatly influenced by the work of John
Haldane,
the two men joined Julian Huxley, John
Cockcroft and sixteen other British scientists on a visit to the
Soviet Union in 1931. While there they
had meetings with Nickolai
Bukharin
and other government leaders.
His
research helped developed modern crystallography and he was a founder
of molecular biology. He eventually became professor of physics at
Cambridge University and
in 1932 worked on the development of X-ray crystallography with Dorothy
Hodgkin.
Over the next four years Hodgkin and Bernal produced 12 joint crystallographic
papers.
Bernal
left the Communist
Party in
1934 but he continued to be active in left-wing politics. In 1937
Bernal
became professor of crystallography at Birkbeck
College. Bernal wrote several books on Marxism
and science. This included the Social Function
of Science (1939) and Marx and
Science (1952).
During
the Second World War Bernal was scientific adviser
to Lord
Mountbatten.
He carried out several research projects for the government. This
included working with Solly Zuckerman
on the impact of bombing on people and buildings. In August 1943 he
attended the Quebec Conference and helped to select the landing beachers
for the D-Day invasion of France.
In
1947 Bernal was awarded the US Medal of Freedom. However, his left-wing
views made him an unwanted guest during McCarthyism
and
the US government refused to let him have an American visa.
Bernal became vice-president of the World Peace Committee and in 1951
founded Scientists for Peace, the forerunner of the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)..
Along
with Rosalind Franklin Bernel carried
out research into the tobacco mosaic virus (1953-58). Bernal continued
to publish books and this included The Origin
of Life (1967). John Bernal died in 1971.
Isidore Fankuchen,
Dorothy
Hodgkin, J. D. Bernal
and Dina Fankuchen in September, 1939.
(1)
Sir Herbert Butterfield, interviwed by Andrew Boyle for his book The
Climate of Treason (1979)
Bernal was a big man of
captivating charm who certainly influenced hundreds of undergraduates.
He was that rare creature, a person of truly seminal ideas on a host
of subjects, yet one who would never have exercised the cumulative
persistence with detail required to win a Nobel Prize. I liked Bernal
enormously.
(2)
Tom
Hopkinson, Of This Our
Time (1982)
During
this winter (1940) I met again someone I had come across a few years
earlier at Chelsea parties. This was J. D. Bernal, a professor at
Birkbeck College known to his friends as Sage, partly because of his
vast fund of knowledge and partly on account of his enormous head
with its shock of wavy hair. Sage had now teamed up with another still
more celebrated young professor, Solly Zuckerman, best known at that
time for his studies of apes. During the course of the war they would
together undertake a whole series of important assignments, but at
this moment they were looking into the precise effects of bombing
both on people and on buildings, into which it seemed very little
research had previously been carried out. Their immediate concern
was a casualty survey for which they would travel up and down the
country to wherever some incident appeared to demand investigation,
and I listened fascinated while they told me what they were doing.
"Well,"
I said, "now you've found all this out, suppose you give me some
simple precautions for getting around safely over the next few years?"
"We
could, of course," Sage answered. "But it's a waste of time
since you certainly won't act on them."
I objected
that his attitude was unscientific; how could he know without putting
the matter to the test?
"Very
well," he said, "we'll see. If bombs are falling, lie face
downwards in the gutter. Gutters give good protection - blast and
splinters will almost certainly fly over you. But in case you do get
injured, always wear a notice round your neck. Something conspicuous
- about the size of a school exercise book."
"Why
do I need that?"
"The
effect of blast is to pressurize the lungs - equivalent to suddenly
giving you pneumonia,' he explained. 'So if a Heavy Rescue man or
a sixteen-stone air raid warden kneels on your chest to administer
artificial respiration, you've had it! Your notice will say "Weak
Chest. Don't touch," or words to that effect. You're a journalist-
you can think up your own form of words."
"Thanks,"
I said. "But if I'm lying in the gutter with my notice, I can't
be moving around."
"Oh,
if you want to move around - that's easy! All you need to do is wrap
an eiderdown tightly round you. It absorbs the
blast and protects your lungs. But of course it won't be much help
against splinters."
(3)
Rosalind
Franklin, letter to Anne and David
Sayre (17th December 1953)
For myself, Birkbeck is an improvement on King's, as it
couldn't fail to be. But the disadvantages of Bernal's group are obvious
- a lot of narrow-mindedness, and obstruction directed especially
at those who are not Party members. It's been very slow starting up
there, but I still think it might work out all right in the end. I'm
starting X-ray work on viruses (the old TMV to begin with) and I'm
also to have somebody paid by the Coal Board to work under me on coal
problems more or less the continuation of what I was doing in paris.
But so far I've failed to find a suitable person for the job.
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