Джон Бернал: Рентген кристаллографиясының іргелі негізін салушы ғалым

Irish scientist, pioneer of X ray crystallography in biology (1901–1971)

John Desmond Bernal (his grandfather Jacob Genese, properly Ginesi, had adopted the family name Bernal of his paternal grandmother around 1837). Elizabeth was raised Protestant and would send John to a Protestant school in his youth. Bernal was educated in England first for one term at Stonyhurst College, which he hated and so was moved to Bedford School at the age of 13. A pupil at the school from 1914 to 1919, according to Goldsmith he found it "extremely unpleasant" and most of his fellow students "bored him", but his younger brother Kevin, who was also there, was "some consolation", while Brown claims that "he seemed to adjust easily to life" there. In 1919, he went to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, with a scholarship. At Cambridge, Bernal read both mathematics and science for a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1922, which he followed by another year of natural sciences. He taught himself the theory of space groups, including the quaternion method, which became the mathematical basis of a lengthy paper on crystal structure for which he won a joint prize with Ronald G. W. Norrish in his third year. At Cambridge, he also became known as "Sage", a nickname given to him about 1920 by a young woman working in Charles Kay Ogden's Bookshop at the corner of Bridge Street.

After his graduation, Bernal began research under William Henry Bragg at the Davy Faraday Laboratory at the Royal Institution in London. In 1924 he determined the structure of graphite (the Bernal stacking describes the registry of two graphite planes) and also did work on the crystal structure of bronze. In 1927, he was appointed as the first lecturer in Structural Crystallography at Cambridge, becoming the assistant director of the Cavendish Laboratory in 1934. There, he started applying his crystallographic techniques to organic molecules, starting with oestrin and sterol compounds including cholesterol in 1929, forcing a radical change of thinking among sterol chemists. While at Cambridge, he analysed vitamin B1 (1933), pepsin (1934), vitamin D2 (1935), the sterols (1936) and the tobacco mosaic virus (1937). Max Perutz arrived as a student from Vienna in 1936 and started the work on haemoglobin that would occupy him most of his career. However, Bernal was refused fellowships at Emmanuel and Christ's and tenure by Ernest Rutherford, who disliked him, and in 1937, Bernal became Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London, a department that had been brought to the first rank by Patrick Blackett. The same year, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

In the early 1930s, Bernal had been arguing for peace, but that changed after the Spanish Civil War started. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Bernal joined the Ministry of Home Security, where he brought in Solly Zuckerman to carry out the first proper analyses of the effects of enemy bombing and of explosions on animals and people. Their subsequent analysis of the effects of bombs on Birmingham and Kingston upon Hull showed that city bombing produced little disruption and production was affected only by direct hits on factories. A supper for scientists organised by the Tots and Quots in Soho generated a multi author book Science in War produced in a month by Allen Lane, one of the guests, arguing that science should be applied in every part of the war effort. From 1942, he and Zuckerman served as scientific advisers to Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Chief of Combined Operations. This project indirectly marked his divergence from Zuckerman, when he was recalled from a joint tour of the Middle East investigating the co operation of army and air force, but the tour established Zuckerman's reputation as a military scientist.

After the disaster of the Dieppe raid, Bernal was determined that its mistakes not be repeated in Operation Overlord. He demonstrated the advantages of an artificial harbour to the participants of the Quebec Conference in 1943, as the only British scientist present. On 3 June 1944, he was commissioned a temporary lieutenant (Special Branch) in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR). His main contribution to the Normandy landings was the detailed mapping of the beaches, which had to be done without attracting any German attention. His knowledge of the area stemmed from research in English libraries, personal experience (he had visited Arromanches on previous holidays) and aerial surveys. At Bernal's memorial service, Zuckerman downplayed Bernal's part in the Normandy landings and said that he was not cleared for the highest levels of security. Given Bernal's Marxist and pro Soviet sympathies, it is perhaps remarkable that there has never been any suggestion that he fed any information in that direction. However, Brown provides evidence of Bernal's contributions to the preparation and the success of the invasion. After assisting in the preparations for D Day with work on the structure of the proposed landing sites and the bocage countryside beyond, Bernal landed, according to C. P. Snow, at Normandy on the afternoon of D Day+1 in the uniform of an Instructor Lieutenant Royal Navy to record the effectiveness of the plans. He also assisted boats floundering on the rocks by using his knowledge of the area but said, "I committed the frightful solecism of not knowing which was port and which side was starboard".

Raised as a Catholic, Bernal became a socialist in Cambridge as a result of a long night arguing with a friend. He also became an atheist. According to one reviewer, "This conversion, as complete as St. Paul's on the road to Damascus, goes some way to account for, but not excuse, Bernal's blind allegiance for the rest of his life, to the Soviet Union". He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1923. His membership evidently lapsed when he returned to Cambridge in 1927 and was not renewed until 1933, and he may have lost his card again shortly afterward. Consequently, when Bernal was invited to a world peace conference in New York in February 1949, his visa was refused. However, he was allowed into France in April for the World Congress of the Partisans of Peace, with Frédéric Joliot Curie as president and Bernal as vice president. The following year the organisation changed its name to the World Peace Council. On 20 September 1949, after his return from giving a speech strongly critical of Western countries at a peace conference in Moscow, the Evening Star newspaper of Ipswich published an interview with Bernal in which he endorsed Soviet agriculture and the "proletarian science" of Trofim Lysenko. In November 1949, the British Association for the Advancement of Science removed Bernal from membership of its council. Membership in British radical science groups quickly declined. Unlike some of his socialist colleagues, Bernal persisted in defending the Soviet position on Lysenko. He publicly refused to accept the gaping fissures that the dispute revealed between the study of natural science and dialectical materialism. In November 1950, Pablo Picasso, a fellow communist, en route to a Soviet sponsored World Peace Congress in Sheffield created a mural in Bernal's flat at the top of No. 22 Torrington Square. In 2007, it became part of the Wellcome Trust's collection for £250,000. Throughout the 1950s, Bernal maintained a faith in the Soviet Union as a vehicle for the creation of a socialist scientific utopia. In 1953, he was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize. From 1959 to 1965, he was president of the World Peace Council.

Bernal had two children – Mike (1926–2016) and Egan (b.1930)

In the early 1930s he had a brief intimate relationship with chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, whose scientific research work he mentored. He had a long term relationship with the artists' patron Margaret Gardiner. Their son Martin Bernal (1937–2013) was a professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University and author of the controversial Afrocentric work Black Athena. Margaret referred to herself as "Mrs. Bernal", though the two never married. Eileen is mentioned as his widow in 1990. He also had a child (Jane, born 1953) with Margot Heinemann.