A flawed genius
Sebastian Faulks
J. D. BERNAL: THE SAGE OF SCIENCE by Andrew Brown OUP, £25, pp. 562, ISBN 0198515448 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Desmond Bernal was one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. He was a pioneer of X-ray crystallography, which he believed could be applied to the study of ‘life’; he helped lay the foundations of molecular biology; and through his work in Cambridge and at Birkbeck College, London he inspired a generation of pupils, including Dorothy Hodgkin, to great discoveries and Nobel prizes. He helped plan the Normandy landings; he was a near-omniscient amateur historian, a penetrating art critic, a serial philanderer, charmer, wit and — alas, alas — unrepentant Soviet apologist, a Stalinist ‘tanky’ through and beyond the invasion of Hungary in 1956.
Bernal’s was, to put it mildly, a ‘20thcentury life’; and in Andrew Brown, a doctor by profession, he has found a biographer able to explain the importance of his scientific work in lucid terms, but one who brings an unblinking diagnostic eye to the public activities. To read this book is almost to relive the European intellectual life of the last century.
The Bernals were Irish farmers of originally Sephardic Jewish origin and Desmond’s mother was an UlsterAmerican Protestant who converted to Catholicism. The precocious Desmond was brought up Catholic and sent to school at Stonyhurst in Yorkshire, thence to Bedford where he conceived a dislike of the English. Right from the start, this fiery little boy loved big positions and passionate postures. The thrill of intellectual discovery was not enough for him; he had always to engage with lived human experience.
As a mathematics scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Bernal found himself at odds with the Puritan atmosphere; he told his tutor he was a Sinn Feiner. This did not stop him drawing on Emmanuel’s considerable intellectual resources when he switched to Natural Sciences. He at once started working on the three-dimensional symmetries of crystals. Chemistry was ‘too smelly’ and geology ‘too full of names’: a physicist was born.
Andrew Brown’s account of Bernal’s scientific work is written with extraordinary clarity, and the ideas are rendered as simply as complex ideas can be; if I was not able to follow every twist, that is not Dr Brown’s fault. In passing, he helpfully quotes the scientist who thought of X-rays as waves on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and particles on the even days; Sundays they had off. Brown’s narrative of Bernal’s life outside the lab does not always have the same concentrated purity of style — perhaps the challenge was less great — but is always fair-minded and easy to read.
Bernal married young, but had so many mistresses and quasi-wives that even they seem sometimes to have been confused about their status. A handsome man with a high voice and silly hair (which reportedly cost him a fellowship at Christ’s), Bernal talked to everyone on equal terms. So omniscient did he appear that fellow-visitors to museums presumed he was the curator when they heard him in full flow. He could make science live for children as well as for his research students. Women, not unnaturally, were drawn to him; but as an intellectual he did not merely sleep around, he made a political issue of it.
Bernal was convinced that modern physics held the key to answering biological problems and that X-ray crystallography had allowed him and his colleagues to grasp the ‘chemical and physical nature of the protein molecule’ that was the key to it all. By 1929, however, he had also started travelling to the Soviet Union, by which he was hugely impressed: ‘grim but great’. His renown as scientist and man of affairs was increased by his portrayal in The Search by C. P. Snow as Constantine, ‘the most original, the wildest mind in England’.
Throughout the 1930s, Bernal’s opposition to Fascism helped him to ignore all uncomfortable evidence from the Soviet Union. Even the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 was somehow overlooked. His mistress asked him at this time if he would kill her at the Party’s command and he answered, ‘Yes, I would — but very reluctantly.’ Max Perutz, one of Bernal’s pupils at Cambridge, told Andrew Brown that Bernal ‘must have been one of those characters who needed an absolute belief’. He was not alone. J. B. S. Haldane, his intellectual equal and nearcontemporary, was a Soviet agent and believing communist until 1956. Brown quotes a fine passage by Arthur Koestler on the ‘mental rapture’ of finding true belief in Marx when all else in Europe had failed and Hitler was looming.
As an Irish citizen Bernal could have spent the war abroad, but he stayed to advise the government on civil defence, bomb disposal and air-raid damage before joining Mountbatten’s Combined Operations. Here, with Solly Zuckerman, he investigated the use of icebergs reinforced with wood pulp as floating aircraft carriers and advised on geophysical aspects of the Normandy landings. Zuckerman later claimed that Bernal contributed little to Overlord other than a ‘general catalytic influence’, but Brown has found witnesses who suggest that Bernal’s input was highly significant.
The logic of the the defeat of Fascism was obvious to Bernal: ‘mankind’ must move communally, with scientific planning, towards peace and against nuclear war. The Soviet Union, defeater of the Nazis, was naturally the new leader. And for Bernal, as George Orwell witheringly pointed out, ‘co-operating with the Soviet Union meant not criticising the Stalin regime’.
Not criticising Stalin became Bernal’s major postwar activity and led to his life’s most shameful episode: the endorsement of Lysenko, the Soviet ‘geneticist’ whose unscientific dogma, based on Marxist refusal to accept the unalterable influence of genes, led to the falsification of science, failed harvests and the assassination of dissidents. When confronted with a choice between the intellectual facts of Mendelian genetics and the emotional flush of his love for communism, Bernal chose the latter.
He justified the Soviet invasion of Hungary on the grounds that it quelled a nascent anti-Semitism. On the council of the Soviet-funded World Peace Organisation, Bernal shuttled all over Europe, and his understanding of thermonuclear war may have helped rein in Khrushchev, whose ear he frequently had. However, at the very moment that Bernal was on the podium in Moscow, Khrushchev was despatching nuclear missiles to Cuba, so the case is not proven. Although he refused to condone the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Bernal said the Russians had been provoked by ‘reactionary forces ... acting on the orders of the American government’.
At Birkbeck, Bernal continued to work prodigiously. Although he missed the Nobel prize, narrowly, he continued to inspire others. Andrew Brown has drawn an impressive testimony to the achievements of Bernal’s flawed genius from Aaron Klug, Francis Crick, John Kendrew and many more. Max Perutz was amused by Bernal’s enthusiasm for economic planning because he was a ‘man who never planned anything. He was totally disorganised.’ Nobel laureate Sir Edward Appleton thought there were ‘two Bernals’, the peerless scientist and the political dupe. Andrew Brown subtly suggests that Bernal’s two sides were in fact connected: that his grand belief in the possibilities of X-ray crystallography was driven by passion as well as by intellect and that his communism showed only a different mixture of those two elements. In the end, Brown is himself too much a scientist to force a neat conclusion on to the amazing story of J. D. Bernal’s life and mind; but he takes us on a thrilling voyage and the reader is content to have been, in the better sense of the term, a fellow-traveller on that extraordinary journey.
Sebastian Faulks’ latest book, Human Traces, is published by Hutchinson, £17.99.
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