Title: J.D.Bernal The Sage of Science
Author: Andrew Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press 2005
Price: £25 (hardback)
ISBN 0-19-851544-8 576 pages, 27 photographs
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John Desmond Bernal was a remarkable man; born in Ireland in 1901 he spent
most of his life in England where he died in 1971. He had an attractive
personality and an insatiable curiosity; unlike most people he could recall
information and talk knowledgeably on many topics, which caused his
colleagues to refer to him as "Sage" since his undergraduate days.
His wide interests in science, politics and the arts make him a very
difficult subject for a biographer. Dorothy Hodgkin took ten years to write his 'Biographical memoir' (see Ref 1 below) for the Royal Society. A contemporary of his, the novelist C.P.Snow, wrote a novel, "The Search" in 1934, where one of the main characters is an X-Ray crystallographer with many resemblances to Bernal. Brenda Swann and Francis Aprahamian edited a collection of essays mainly on his life in politics published in 1999 (see Ref 2 below). |
Andrew Brown, an English radiation oncologist practising in New Hampshire, has been working on this biography for the last five years and has interviewed many eminent scientists and others who knew Bernal. The result is this massive work, weighing 1 Kg, where he describes both the political activities in Europe and the science being carried out at the time to set the scene in which Bernal found himself. For example, the work of the Braggs leading to their Nobel Prize in 1915 is described because W.H.Bragg was about to become the Director of the Royal Institution just before Bernal went to work there after graduation in 1923. He spent a lot of time in his final undergraduate year working on a paper in which he derived the analytical theory of point systems, as a result he failed to get a first and so could not be accepted as a doctorate student at Cambridge. This was one of his characteristics, getting sidetracked on other projects rather than concentrate on the one which others may have thought most important, and also in those projects deriving things written up more thoroughly later by others. Later he suggested problems for his students, five of whom won Nobel prizes.
The book is ordered chronologically, divided into 22 chapters and a Postscript, each with extensive footnotes, on average about 70 per chapter. The footnotes might have been better printed at the end of each chapter instead of all being collected together at the end of the book. The chapters themselves have names and numbers but the footnotes sections only numbers which makes them hard to find when one finger is keeping your place in the chapter, the other fingers are trying to hold several hundred pages together while with the other hand you are trying to find which section of Notes to read.
There is only one diagram which seems strange when crystallographers think in three dimensions and descriptions of biological molecules in words take longer to understand. I have not met 'Bernal Charts' and would have liked to see a diagram of one.
Other things lacking are a complete bibliography of all his works, though you can probably construct one from the Notes, and a brief summary of the important events in his life.
There are 27 photographs, which appear to be an afterthought as I could not find any reference to them in the body of the text. They cover a period of time between about 1900, photographs of his parents, to 1962, Bernal listening to Krushchev addressing a World Congress on Disarmament on Peace in Moscow.
There is much new detail in this book, for example, about his mother, 'Bessie' Bernal. He was her first child and she taught him to talk in French and English, answered his endless questions and encouraged his interest in travel by taking him across the Atlantic by sea and on across the continent by train to visit his American relatives as a child of 3.
Bessie was the daughter of the Reverend William Young Miller, a Presbyterian Minister from New England, who had married her mother Elizabeth in Illinois. When he retired in 1883 he moved to San Jose, California not far from Stanford University which Bessie attended to study languages. Her influence may explain why Bernal was willing to give women a chance to work on crystallography in his Birkbeck laboratory, an unusual occurrence in those days just after World War II.
In his youth he was a devout Catholic and when he lost his faith almost immediately he found Communism which he treated with religious fervour being reluctant to see evil in any Soviet actions, In chapter 6, 'Soviet Pilgrims', we learn he went to Leningrad on a lecture tour with Margaret Gardiner at the time of Kirov's assassination but dismissed the rumour that Stalin had ordered the killing as 'malicious gossip'.
Bernal lived through most of the turmoil of the 20th century. He travelled from Ireland to school in England at the time of the Easter rebellion in 1916, survived influenza in the pandemic of 1918, lived through the Depression of the 1930s, lived a Bohemian life style between the Wars in an unconventional marriage where both partners took lovers; his 4 children had 3 different mothers. He worked with Lord Mountbatten during World War II on the planning for the D-Day landings and worked tirelessly for peace. Andrew Brown gives extensive background information on all of these events but there is not space to summarise them here.
Buy the book for yourself and read the chapters on the early history of molecular biology, the Physics of Life and the difficulties of doing crystallography without access to modern computers so your calculations have to be done using 7-figure log tables.
Kate Crennell
July 2006
References