Information about John Desmond Bernal

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

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.

Academic career

He was educated at Bedford School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where 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.

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 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 Emmanuel Hessen, who gave an influential Marxist acount 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 awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1953.

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 "right" and "left" 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 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. He had three other children, two with Agnes Eileen Sprague whom he married in 1921, and one with Margot Heinemann.

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
• Sage: A Life of JD Bernal (1980) Maurice Goldsmith
• J. D. Bernal: The Sage of Science by Andrew Brown (Oxford University Press, November 2005).
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: ‘Bernal, (John) Desmond (1901–1971)’,by Robert Olby, first published Sept 2004, 2870 words, with portrait illustration

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" (http://human-nature.com/rmyoung/papers/paper93h.html)
• 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