73-475: John Desmond Bernal FRS ( / b ər ˈ n ɑː l / ; 10 May 1901 – 15 September 1971) was an Irish scientist who pioneered the use of X-ray crystallography in molecular biology . He published extensively on the history of science . In addition, Bernal wrote popular books on science and society. He was a communist activist and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). His family
146-415: 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
219-593: 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
292-735: A Chair (all of whom are Fellows of the Royal Society ). Members of the 10 Sectional Committees change every three years to mitigate in-group bias . Each Sectional Committee covers different specialist areas including: New Fellows are admitted to the Society at a formal admissions day ceremony held annually in July, when they sign the Charter Book and the Obligation which reads: "We who have hereunto subscribed, do hereby promise, that we will endeavour to promote
365-478: 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 . After World War II, he established Birkbeck's Biomolecular Research Laboratory in two Georgian houses in Torrington Square with 15 researchers. It was there that Aaron Klug and Rosalind Franklin worked on tobacco mosaic virus , and Andrew Donald Booth developed some of
438-469: A farm, Brookwatson , near Nenagh where Bernal was brought up. His American mother, née Elizabeth Miller, whose mother was from Antrim , was a graduate of Stanford University and a journalist and had converted to Catholicism. 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
511-768: A letter to the New Statesman warning that the US was preparing "a war for complete world domination". 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
584-553: 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 . Fellow of
657-601: A meat store freezer below Smithfield Meat Market . 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
730-831: A number of other important honours: he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1963, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that same year, received the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art in 1967, was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1968, elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1970, received the Royal Medal of
803-485: A radical change of thinking among sterol chemists. While at Cambridge, he analysed vitamin B 1 (1933), pepsin (1934), vitamin D 2 (1935), the sterols (1936) and the tobacco mosaic virus (1937). He also worked on the structure of liquid water, showing the boomerang shape of its molecule (1933). It was in Bernal's research group that after a year working with Tiny Powell at Oxford, Dorothy Hodgkin continued her early research career. Together, in 1934, they took
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#1732851944703876-428: A type of space habitat intended for permanent residence. The second chapter explores radical changes to human bodies and intelligence and the third discusses the impact of these on society. In The Social Function of Science (1939) he argued that science was not an individual pursuit of abstract knowledge and that the support of research and development should be dramatically increased. Eugene Garfield , originator of
949-652: 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 . His strength
1022-1321: Is a significant honour. It has been awarded to many eminent scientists throughout history, including Isaac Newton (1672), Benjamin Franklin (1756), Charles Babbage (1816), Michael Faraday (1824), Charles Darwin (1839), Ernest Rutherford (1903), Srinivasa Ramanujan (1918), Jagadish Chandra Bose (1920), Albert Einstein (1921), Paul Dirac (1930), Winston Churchill (1941), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1944), Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1945), Dorothy Hodgkin (1947), Alan Turing (1951), Lise Meitner (1955), Satyendra Nath Bose (1958), and Francis Crick (1959). More recently, fellowship has been awarded to Stephen Hawking (1974), David Attenborough (1983), Tim Hunt (1991), Elizabeth Blackburn (1992), Raghunath Mashelkar (1998), Tim Berners-Lee (2001), Venki Ramakrishnan (2003), Atta-ur-Rahman (2006), Andre Geim (2007), Bai Chunli (2014), James Dyson (2015), Ajay Kumar Sood (2015), Subhash Khot (2017), Elon Musk (2018), Elaine Fuchs (2019) and around 8,000 others in total, including over 280 Nobel Laureates since 1900. As of October 2018 , there are approximately 1,689 living Fellows, Foreign and Honorary Members, of whom 85 are Nobel Laureates. Fellowship of
1095-677: Is confirmed by the Council in April, and a secret ballot of Fellows is held at a meeting in May. A candidate is elected if they secure two-thirds of votes of those Fellows voting. An indicative allocation of 18 Fellowships can be allocated to candidates from Physical Sciences and Biological Sciences; and up to 10 from Applied Sciences, Human Sciences and Joint Physical and Biological Sciences. A further maximum of six can be 'Honorary', 'General' or 'Royal' Fellows. Nominations for Fellowship are peer reviewed by Sectional Committees, each with at least 12 members and
1168-421: Is nominated by two Fellows of the Royal Society (a proposer and a seconder), who sign a certificate of proposal. Previously, nominations required at least five fellows to support each nomination by the proposer, which was criticised for supposedly establishing an old boy network and elitist gentlemen's club . The certificate of election (see for example ) includes a statement of the principal grounds on which
1241-484: The King's College laboratory of Sir John Randall . This report contained X-ray diffraction images taken by Rosalind Franklin that proved to be crucial in coming to the double-helix structure. Perutz did this without Franklin's knowledge or permission, and before she had a chance to publish a detailed analysis of the content of her unpublished progress report. Later this action was criticised by Randall and others, in view of
1314-825: The Royal Society in 1971, appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1975, received the Copley Medal in 1979 and became a Member of the Order of Merit in 1988. Perutz was made a Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 1964, received an Honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna (1965) and received the Wilhelm Exner Medal in 1967. He was elected to EMBO Membership in 1964. The European Crystallographic Association established
1387-583: The Science Citation Index , said "his idea of a centralized reprint center was in my thoughts when I first proposed the as yet nonexistent SCI in Science in 1955." Science in History (1954) is a monumental four-volume attempt to analyse the interaction between science and society. The Origin of Life (1967) gives the current ideas from Oparin and Haldane onwards. Other publications include Raised as
1460-528: The University of Limerick was named in his honour. He is the eponym of the John Desmond Bernal Prize . Bernal's brass microscope, in the possession of his great-grandson, was restored in an episode of the BBC Television series The Repair Shop shown in April 2023. Bernal had two children – Mike (1926–2016) and Egan (b.1930) – with his wife Agnes Eileen Sprague (1898–1990), a secretary, who
1533-691: 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 was awarded the Royal Medal in 1945, the Guthrie lecture in 1947, the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953,
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#17328519447031606-426: The post-nominal letters FRS . Every year, fellows elect up to ten new foreign members. Like fellows, foreign members are elected for life through peer review on the basis of excellence in science. As of 2016 , there are around 165 foreign members, who are entitled to use the post-nominal ForMemRS . Honorary Fellowship is an honorary academic title awarded to candidates who have given distinguished service to
1679-499: The Catholic religion. Although Perutz rejected religion and was an atheist in his later years, he was against offending others for their religious beliefs. His parents hoped that he would become a lawyer, but he became interested in chemistry while at school. Overcoming his parents' objections he enrolled as a chemistry undergraduate at the University of Vienna and completed his degree in 1936. Made aware by lecturer Fritz von Wessely of
1752-732: The Grotius Gold Medal in 1959 and the Bakerian Lecture in 1962. Bernal was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1937. A fictional portrait of Bernal appears in the novel The Search , an early work of his friend C. P. Snow . He was also said to be the inspiration for the character Tengal in The Holiday by Stevie Smith . The Bernal Lecture and its successor the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Lecture Medal and Lecture were named in his honour. The Bernal Building at
1825-549: The Kelvin Club, the college's scientific society. When Hitler took over Austria in 1938, Perutz's parents managed to escape to Switzerland, but they had lost all of their money. As a result, Perutz lost their financial support. With his ability to ski, experience in mountaineering since childhood and his knowledge of crystals, Perutz was accepted as a member of a three-man team to study the conversion of snow into ice in Swiss glaciers in
1898-658: The MRC. In his later years, Perutz was a regular reviewer/essayist for The New York Review of Books on biomedical subjects. Many of these essays are reprinted in his 1998 book, I wish I had made you angry earlier . In August 1985, The New Yorker published his account of his experiences as an internee during World War II, titled "That Was the War: Enemy Alien". Perutz won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science in 1997. A collection of Perutz's correspondence
1971-638: The Max Perutz Prize, named in his honour. In 1980, Perutz was invited to deliver one of the six lectures for the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on The Chicken, the Egg and the Molecules . In 1942, Perutz married Gisela Clara Mathilde Peiser (1915–2005), a medical photographer. They had two children, Vivien (b. 1944), an art historian; and Robin (b. 1949), a professor of chemistry at
2044-536: The Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society ( FRS , ForMemRS and HonFRS ) is an award granted by the Fellows of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge , including mathematics , engineering science , and medical science ". Fellowship of the Society, the oldest known scientific academy in continuous existence,
2117-439: The Royal Society has been described by The Guardian as "the equivalent of a lifetime achievement Oscar " with several institutions celebrating their announcement each year. Up to 60 new Fellows (FRS), honorary (HonFRS) and foreign members (ForMemRS) are elected annually in late April or early May, from a pool of around 700 proposed candidates each year. New Fellows can only be nominated by existing Fellows for one of
2190-655: The Society, we shall be free from this Obligation for the future". Since 2014, portraits of Fellows at the admissions ceremony have been published without copyright restrictions in Wikimedia Commons under a more permissive Creative Commons license which allows wider re-use. In addition to the main fellowships of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS & HonFRS), other fellowships are available which are applied for by individuals, rather than through election. These fellowships are research grant awards and holders are known as Royal Society Research Fellows . In addition to
2263-518: The Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin . In 1939, Bernal published The Social Function of Science , probably the earliest text on the sociology of science . After World War II, although Bernal had been involved in evaluating the effects of atomic attacks against the Soviet Union, he supported the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace organised in Communist Poland in 1948. Afterwards, he wrote
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2336-504: 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
2409-435: The advances being undertaken at the University of Cambridge into biochemistry by a team led by Gowland Hopkins , he asked Professor Mark , who was soon to visit Cambridge, to make inquiries of Hopkins about whether there would be a place for him. Mark forgot, but had visited J.D. Bernal , who was looking for a research student to assist him with studies into X-ray crystallography. Perutz was dismayed as he knew nothing about
2482-605: 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
2555-631: 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
2628-508: The award of Fellowship (FRS, HonFRS & ForMemRS) and the Research Fellowships described above, several other awards, lectures and medals of the Royal Society are also given. Max Perutz Max Ferdinand Perutz OM CH CBE FRS (19 May 1914 – 6 February 2002) was an Austrian-born British molecular biologist , who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with John Kendrew , for their studies of
2701-468: The basis of scientific research and, in molecular biology at least, they are not necessarily subject to revision either. For Perutz, Kuhn's notion that science advances in paradigm shifts that are subject to social and cultural pressures is an unfair representation of modern science. These criticisms extended to scientists who attack religion, in particular to Dawkins. Statements which offend people's religious faith were for Perutz tactless and simply damage
2774-597: The cause of science, but do not have the kind of scientific achievements required of Fellows or Foreign Members. Honorary Fellows include the World Health Organization's Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (2022), Bill Bryson (2013), Melvyn Bragg (2010), Robin Saxby (2015), David Sainsbury, Baron Sainsbury of Turville (2008), Onora O'Neill (2007), John Maddox (2000), Patrick Moore (2001) and Lisa Jardine (2015). Honorary Fellows are entitled to use
2847-464: The crystals in the layers of a glacier, he was asked for advice on whether if a battalion of commandos were landed in Norway, could they be hidden in shelters under glaciers. His knowledge on the subject of ice then led to him being recruited for Project Habakkuk in 1942. This was a secret project to build an ice platform in the mid-Atlantic, which could be used to refuel aircraft. To that end he investigated
2920-504: The death of thousands more innocent people, driving us into a world of escalating terror and counter-terror. I do hope that you can use your restraining influence to prevent this happening." Perutz was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1954 . In addition to the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1962, which he shared with John Kendrew for their respective studies of the structures of haemoglobin and myoglobin, Max Perutz received
2993-499: The earliest computers to help with the computation. His Guthrie lecture of 1947 concentrated on proteins as the basis of life, but it was Max Perutz, still at Cambridge, who developed the X-ray structural analysis of globular proteins in Britain. In the early 1960s, Bernal returned to the subject of the origin of life, analysing meteorites for evidence of complex molecules, and to the topic of
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3066-540: 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
3139-515: The fellowships described below: Every year, up to 52 new fellows are elected from the United Kingdom, the rest of the Commonwealth of Nations , and Ireland, which make up around 90% of the society. Each candidate is considered on their merits and can be proposed from any sector of the scientific community. Fellows are elected for life on the basis of excellence in science and are entitled to use
3212-572: The first X-ray photographs of hydrated protein crystals using the trick of bathing the crystals in their mother liquor, giving one of the first glimpses of the world of molecular structure that underlies living things. 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 ,
3285-530: The good of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, and to pursue the ends for which the same was founded; that we will carry out, as far as we are able, those actions requested of us in the name of the Council; and that we will observe the Statutes and Standing Orders of the said Society. Provided that, whensoever any of us shall signify to the President under our hands, that we desire to withdraw from
3358-561: The molecular structure of biological systems. This financial support allowed him to establish the Molecular Biology Unit at the Cavendish Laboratory. Perutz's new unit attracted researchers who realised that the field of molecular biology had great promise; among them were Francis Crick in 1949 and James D. Watson in 1951. In 1953, Perutz showed that diffracted X-rays from protein crystals could be phased by comparing
3431-459: The money Perutz was able to bring his parents from Switzerland to England in March 1939. On the outbreak of World War II, Perutz was rounded up along with other persons of German or Austrian background , and sent to Newfoundland (on orders from Winston Churchill). After being interned for several months he returned to Cambridge. Because of his pre-War research into the changes in the arrangement of
3504-696: 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 . The Lysenko affair had erupted in August 1948, when Stalin authorised Lysenko's theory of plant genetics as official Soviet orthodoxy, and he refused any deviation. Bernal and
3577-489: The patterns from crystals of the protein with and without heavy atoms attached. In 1959 he employed this method to determine the molecular structure of the protein haemoglobin , which transports oxygen in the blood. This work resulted in his sharing with John Kendrew the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry . Nowadays the molecular structures of several thousand proteins are determined by X-ray crystallography every year. After 1959, Perutz and his colleagues went on to determine
3650-509: The post nominal letters HonFRS . Statute 12 is a legacy mechanism for electing members before official honorary membership existed in 1997. Fellows elected under statute 12 include David Attenborough (1983) and John Palmer, 4th Earl of Selborne (1991). The Council of the Royal Society can recommend members of the British royal family for election as Royal Fellow of the Royal Society . As of 2023 there are four royal fellows: Elizabeth II
3723-412: 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
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#17328519447033796-493: The proposal is being made. There is no limit on the number of nominations made each year. In 2015, there were 654 candidates for election as Fellows and 106 candidates for Foreign Membership. The Council of the Royal Society oversees the selection process and appoints 10 subject area committees, known as Sectional Committees, to recommend the strongest candidates for election to the Fellowship. The final list of up to 52 Fellowship candidates and up to 10 Foreign Membership candidates
3869-441: The recently invented mixture of ice and woodpulp known as pykrete . He carried out early experiments on pykrete in a secret location underneath Smithfield Meat Market in the City of London . After the War he returned briefly to glaciology, demonstrating how glaciers flow. In 1947, Perutz, with the support of Professor Bragg, was successful in obtaining support from the Medical Research Council (MRC) to undertake research into
3942-492: The reputation of science, though he did not criticize scientists opposing "demonstrably false" theories such as creationism . He concluded that "even if we do not believe in God, we should try to live as though we did." Within days of the 11 September attacks in 2001, Perutz wrote to British Prime Minister Tony Blair , appealing to him to not respond with military force: "I am alarmed by the American cries for vengeance and concerned that President Bush's retaliation will lead to
4015-459: The results and the honours resulting from this "gift". In an effort to clarify this issue, Perutz later published the report, arguing that it included nothing that Franklin had not said in a talk she gave in late 1951, which Watson had attended. Perutz also added that the report was addressed to an MRC committee created to "establish contact between the different groups of people working for the Council". Randall's and Perutz's labs were both funded by
4088-399: 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 ". Bernal's 1929 work The World, the Flesh and the Devil has been called "the most brilliant attempt at scientific prediction ever made" by Arthur C. Clarke . It is famous for having been the first to propose the so-called Bernal sphere ,
4161-474: The structural changes in a number of haemoglobin diseases and how these might affect oxygen binding. He hoped that the molecule could be made to function as a drug receptor and that it would be possible to inhibit or reverse the genetic errors such as those that occur in sickle cell anaemia . A further interest was the variation of the haemoglobin molecule from species to species to suit differing habitats and patterns of behaviour. In his final years Perutz turned to
4234-466: The structure of liquids, which he talked about in his Bakerian lecture in 1962. 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
4307-431: The structure of oxy- and deoxy- haemoglobin at high resolution. As a result, in 1970, he was at last able to suggest how it works as a molecular machine: how it switches between its deoxygenated and its oxygenated states, in turn triggering the uptake of oxygen and then its release to the muscles and other organs. Further work over the next two decades refined and corroborated the proposed mechanism. In addition Perutz studied
4380-468: The structures of haemoglobin and myoglobin . He went on to win the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1971 and the Copley Medal in 1979. At Cambridge he founded and chaired (1962–79) The MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), fourteen of whose scientists have won Nobel Prizes. Perutz was born in Vienna , the son of Adele "Dely" (Goldschmidt) and Hugo Perutz, a textile manufacturer. His parents were Jewish by ancestry, but had baptised Perutz in
4453-449: The study of changes in protein structures implicated in Huntington and other neurodegenerative diseases. He demonstrated that the onset of Huntington disease is related to the number of glutamine repeats as they bind to form what he called a "polar zipper". During the early 1950s, while Watson and Crick were trying to determine the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), they were given by Perutz an unpublished 1952 progress report for
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#17328519447034526-499: The subject. Mark countered by saying that he would soon learn. Bernal accepted him as a research student in his crystallography research group at the Cavendish Laboratory . His father had deposited £500 with his London agent to support him. He learnt quickly. Bernal encouraged him to use the X-ray diffraction method to study the structure of proteins. As protein crystals were difficult to obtain, he used horse haemoglobin crystals, and began his doctoral thesis on its structure. Haemoglobin
4599-418: The summer of 1938. His resulting article for the Proceedings of the Royal Society made him known as an expert on glaciers. Lawrence Bragg, who was Professor of Experimental Physics at the Cavendish, thought that Perutz's research into haemoglobin had promise and encouraged him to apply for a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to continue his research. The application was accepted in January 1939 and with
4672-407: The war effort. From 1942, he and Zuckerman served as scientific advisers to Lord Louis Mountbatten , the Chief of Combined Operations. Bernal was able to argue on both sides of Project Habbakuk , Geoffrey Pyke 's proposal to build huge aircraft landing platforms in the North Atlantic made of ice. He rescued Max Perutz from internment, getting him to perform experiments on ice related to Habbakuk in
4745-574: The whole British scientific left were damaged by his support for Lysenko's theory, even after many scientists had abandoned their sympathy for the Soviet Union. Under pressure from the burgeoning Cold War , the president of British Royal Society had resigned from the Soviet Academy of Sciences in November 1948. 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
4818-423: Was Irish, with a mix of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Sephardic Jewish on his father's side (his grandfather Jacob Genese, properly Ginesi, had adopted the family name Bernal of his paternal grandmother around 1837). His father Samuel Bernal had been raised as a Catholic in Limerick and after graduating from Albert Agricultural College spent 14 years in Australia before returning to County Tipperary to buy
4891-406: Was a subject which was to occupy him for most of his professional career. He completed his Ph.D. under Lawrence Bragg in 1940. He applied to Kings and St. John's colleges, and became a member of Peterhouse , on the basis that it served the best food. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse in 1962. He took a keen interest in the Junior Members, and was a regular and popular speaker at
4964-530: Was in analysis as much as experimental method, and his mathematical and practical treatment of determining crystal structure was widely studied, but he also developed an X-ray spectro- goniometer . 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
5037-466: 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
5110-421: Was not a Royal Fellow, but provided her patronage to the society, as all reigning British monarchs have done since Charles II of England . Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1951) was elected under statute 12, not as a Royal Fellow. The election of new fellows is announced annually in May, after their nomination and a period of peer-reviewed selection. Each candidate for Fellowship or Foreign Membership
5183-454: Was not renewed until 1933, and he may have lost his card again shortly afterward. Bernal became a prominent intellectual in political life, particularly in the 1930s. He attended the famous 1931 meeting on the 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 . That meeting fundamentally changed his world view and he maintained sympathy for
5256-436: Was published posthumously in 2009, titled What a Time I Am Having: Selected Letters of Max Perutz . Perutz attacked the theories of philosophers Sir Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn and biologist Richard Dawkins in a lecture given at Cambridge on 'Living Molecules' in 1994. He criticised Popper's notion that science progresses through a process of hypothesis formation and refutation, saying that hypotheses are not necessarily
5329-409: Was usually referred to as Eileen. He married Sprague on 21 June 1922, the day after having been awarded his BA degree. Bernal was 21, Sprague 23. Sprague was described as an active socialist and their marriage as 'open' which they both lived up to 'with great gusto'. In the early 1930s he had a brief intimate relationship with chemist Dorothy Hodgkin , whose scientific research work he mentored. He had
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