Science and Society in War and Peace

Andrew Brown. J. D. Bernal: The Sage of Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xiv + 562 pp. $34.95

Reviewed by Roy H. W. Johnston

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) began his professional career as a physicist and crystallographer, but he developed such wide-ranging interests that he is usually described as a polymath. Beyond his scientific work Bernal contributed robust critical writings on the peace dividend, the third world, development economics, the modeling of complex systems in stochastic environments (a process which eventually emerged under the label operational research), and science’s role in history, society, government, war, and peace.

Bernal’s most important scientific research, in X-ray crystallography, was dedicated to understanding the structures of proteins and viruses—the physical basis of life. He developed the experimental technology that Rosalind Franklin used to visualize the structure of DNA, giving James Watson and Francis Crick the key to elucidating its double-helical structure. Bernal’s scientific career also fuelled Nobel Prize–winning work by Lawrence Bragg, Patrick M. S. Blackett, John C. Kendrew, Max F. Perutz, and others, all of whom recognized Bernal’s influence.

The bulk of Andrew Brown’s new biography reflects Bernal’s interest in what became known as “science and society.” In the years before World War II Bernal established a reputation as a Marxist social critic. His early views on Soviet science were somewhat uncritical (he initially accepted Lysenkoism), and Brown treats these without any whitewashing. His later work in the cold war peace movement might have contributed to the peaceful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis as he had a direct line to Khrushchev via the Soviet scientific establishment.

In 1938, as World War II loomed, Bernal was recruited into civil defense work for Britain, analyzing the impact of bombing on people and buildings. During the war he worked with Lord Mountbatten planning the D day invasion. Unable to visit the actual beaches in Normandy, Bernal assembled quantitative evidence from a variety of improbable sources to evaluate their suitability as landing sites. By applying mathematical techniques and scientific metaphors to the analysis of tactical and operational problems, Bernal and other British scientists developed processes of operational research that have since been used by countless companies and institution to improve efficiency and minimize cost.

The significance of Bernal’s wartime work with Mountbatten was later questioned by his former colleague Solly Zuckerman. In a postscript Brown demolishes Zuckerman’s arguments, which had reached a wide audience through an earlier biography by Maurice Goldsmith. Partly in response to Goldsmith’s work, Bernal’s trustees commissioned an omnibus biography (J. D. Bernal: A Life in Science and Politics [New York: Verso, 1999]), with many contributions written by people who knew him, including Mountbatten. (I wrote the section on Bernal’s Irish roots.) Brown acknowledges this book but delves in much greater depth into all aspects of Bernal’s life, including his affairs with many women.

My own interest in Bernal goes back to Trinity College in Dublin in the 1940s, when I discovered his Social Function of Science (London: Routledge, 1939). I was trying to understand science and development economics in post-colonial Ireland, then stagnant and crippled by the brain drain. In the mid-1960s I corresponded with Bernal when I was associated with a group of scientists and engineers lobbying the Irish government to take seriously the 1963 report Science and Irish Economic Development. Though he was then in bad health, Bernal offered some good suggestions relating to the then novel area of molecular biology and to the organization of interdisciplinary research more generally: he suggested seeking international funding for an interdisciplinary research center in Ireland.

J. D. Bernal: The Sage of Science is structured roughly chronologically, but the chronologies sometimes overlap as the text switches between Bernal’s various pursuits. Judicious readers will treat this as an interesting jigsaw puzzle, which, when fitted together, gives a superb picture of a true Renaissance man who worked to resurrect science as a key component of culture.