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John Desmond BernalJohn Desmond Bernal FRS (10 May 1901—15 September 1971) was an Irish-born scientist known for pioneering X-ray crystallography. Additional recommended knowledge
CareerHe was born in Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland. He was educated at Bedford School near London, and then at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University. At Cambridge he studied both mathematics and science for a B. A. 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. 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. He was later Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London (where he became Master) and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Political activismBernal was a public intellectual, very prominent in political life, particularly in the 1930s after having left the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1933[citation needed]. According to biographer Maurice Goldsmith, he did not so much withdraw from the CPGB, but lost his card and did not renew it. He had joined in 1923. He attended the famous 1931 meeting on History of Science, where he met the Soviets Nikolai Bukharin and Emmanuel 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 awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1953. War workHe 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 Alan Mackay, 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. FamilyHis family was Sephardic Jewish on his father's side,[1] 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. He had three other children, two with Agnes Eileen Sprague whom he married in 1921, and one with Margot Heinemann. 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
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "John_Desmond_Bernal". A list of authors is available in Wikipedia. |