John Desmond Bernal

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John Desmond Bernal
John Desmond Bernal
John Desmond Bernal
Born 10 May 1901
Nenagh, County Tipperary
Died 15 September 1971
Nationality Ireland
Fields X-ray crystallography
Institutions Birkbeck College, University of London
Notable awards Lenin Peace Prize in 1953

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

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[edit] Career

He was born in Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland. 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 B. A. 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. After graduating he started research under Sir William Bragg at the Davy-Faraday Laboratory in London. In 1924 he determined the structure of graphite.

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.

He was later Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London (where he became Master) and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

[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[citation needed]. According to biographer Maurice Goldsmith, 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.

In 1948/9 he endorsed the "proletarian science" of Trofim Lysenko.

He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1953.

[edit] War work

He is known also as 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 Alan Mackay, 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.

[edit] Family

His family was Sephardic Jewish on his father's side,[1] 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[2][3]. He had three other children, two with Agnes Eileen Sprague whom he married in 1921, and one with Margot Heinemann.

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.

[edit] 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

[edit] 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)

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Hodgkin, Dorothy M. C. (Nov 1980). John Desmond Bernal. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 26: p17. 
  2. ^ Margaret Gardiner, obituary in The Guardian, 5 January 2005. Retrieved on 2008-04-06.
  3. ^ Margaret Gardiner, obituary by Nchima Trust. Retrieved on 2008-04-06.

[edit] References

[edit] External links