John_Desmond_Bernal - Celebrity Encyclopedia

Bernal was the son of a farmer^[2]. His mother was an American journalist^[3]. He was educated at Bedford School near London, and then at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University^[4] 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. Whilst at Cambridge he also 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^[1]. After graduation, he began research under Sir William Bragg at the Davy Faraday Laboratory at the Royal Institution^[3] in London. In 1924 he determined the structure of graphite^[3]. He also did work on bronze^[3]. 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)^[3].

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^[1]. According to biographer Maurice Goldsmith^[1], he did not so much withdraw from the CPGB, but lost his card and did not renew it. He had joined in 1923^[1].

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 1959-1965.

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^[1]. 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 British Association for the Advancement of Science at a meeting on 4 November 1949^[1]^{[nb 1]}. 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^[1]^{[nb 2]}.

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 1953^[5].

War work

With the outbreak of war in 1939, he joined the Ministry of Home Security and carried out with Solly Zuckerman an important analysis of the effects of enemy bombing. Later in the war he served as scientific adviser to Lord Mountbatten , the Chief of Combined Operations^[3].

It was claimed^[1] that he was a joint inventor of the Mulberry Harbour. However, controversy developed around Bernal's role in the planning of D-Day, especially in respect to the authenticity of an account given by Bernal of his crossing of the Channel on D-Day plus 1 and 2. Brown^[6]^[7]^[8] provides strong evidence of his decisive contributions to the preparation and the success of the invasion and states that doubts about Bernal's role were systematically sown by Solly Zuckerman, Bernal's close wartime collaborator on operational matters. Brown cites Zuckerman's invidious character as the main reason for his deplorable action, although political divergences must have played a role as well.

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 ^[9]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) ,^[10] 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^[11]^[12]. Gardiner always referred to herself as "Mrs Bernal". She had had a brief relationship with Solly Zuckerman around 1930^[8]. 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^[1].

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

Quotation

Text notes

Footnotes

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ ^j Goldsmith, Maurice (1980). "Sage: A Life of J D Bernal". London: Hutchinson. ISBN 0 09 139550.
^ Boylan, Henry (1998). A Dictionary of Irish Biography, 3rd Edition. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, p. 25. ISBN 0-7171-2945-4.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f (1999) A Dictionary of Scientists. Oxford University Press. Oxford: OUP. ISBN 0-1928-0086-8.
^ Boylan, Henry (1998). A Dictionary of Irish Biography, 3rd edition. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, p.25. ISBN 0-7171-2945-4.
^ (1959) Yearbook of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (in Russian). Moscow: Sovetskaya Enciklopediya.
^ Brown, Andrew (2005). J D Bernal - The Sage of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0 19 851544 8.
^ de Charadevian, Soraya, Dept of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge (2006). Advocating Science for the People - review of Andrew Brown's book, Science 12 May 2006 Vol 312, no 5775. pp. 849-850.
^ ^a ^b "[1] Solly Zuckerman and J D Bernal, Times review by Christopher Coker of both Andrew Brown's Bernal biography and Bernard Donovan's biography of Zukerman, 8 February 2006]". Retrieved on 2008-11-07.
^ Bevis Marks Records, Vols 1 - 6 of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Congregation, London; Miriam Rodrigues Pereira, ed.
^ Hodgkin, Dorothy M. C. (November 1980). "John Desmond Bernal". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 26: p17, http://links.jstor.org/sici-sici=0080-4606%28198011%2926%3C16%3AJDB1M1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I&size=LARGE&origin=JSTOR-enlargePage. Retrieved on 4 January 2008.
^ "Margaret Gardiner, obituary in The Guardian, 5 January 2005". Retrieved on 2008-04-06.
^ "Margaret Gardiner, obituary by Nchima Trust". Retrieved on 2008-04-06.

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Education and early career