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John Desmond Bernal |
| John Desmond Bernal | |
 John Desmond Bernal
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| Born | 10 May 1901 Nenagh, County Tipperary |
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| Died | 15 September 1971 |
| Nationality | Ireland |
| Fields | X-ray crystallography |
| 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 |
| Notable awards | Lenin Peace Prize in 1953 |
| Religious stance | None known |
John Desmond Bernal FRS (born 10 May 1901, died 15 September 1971) was an Irish-born scientist known for pioneering X-ray crystallography.
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He was born in Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland[1]. He was educated at Bedford School near London, and then at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University[1]. 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. After graduating he started research under Sir William Bragg at the Davy-Faraday Laboratory in London. In 1924 he determined the structure of graphite[1]. 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.
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[2]. According to biographer Maurice Goldsmith[2], he did not so much withdraw from the CPGB, but lost his card and did not renew it. He had joined in 1923[2].
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.citation needed
He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1953.
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 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.
His family was of mixed Italian and Spanish/Portuguese [3]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) ,[4] 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[5][6]. 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.
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