John Desmond Bernal

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John Desmond Bernal in London in 1934
Blue Plaque for John Desmond Bernal; 44 Albert Street, Camden (London)

John Desmond Bernal (born May 10, 1901 in Nenagh , Ireland , † September 15, 1971 in London ) was a British natural scientist who worked in particular in the field of crystallography . His research on biomolecules, especially from 1930 in Cambridge, marked the beginning of modern structural biology .

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Bernal was born into an Irish farming family of Jewish, Catholic and Protestant ancestors. His father was a devout Catholic, his American Protestant mother taught him French as his second mother tongue, and one of his first educational establishments was a Jesuit college.

He studied natural sciences, including mineralogy and mathematics, at Cambridge. He began his research in 1923 under Sir William Henry Bragg in the Davy-Faraday Laboratory. In Cambridge he then continued his structural analyzes of inorganic and later organic substances from 1927 to 1937. The structures of metals and alloys, of silicates as well as of several organic compounds were elucidated, X-ray data was also collected from complex compounds, from which he drew essential conclusions for the vitamins, for example, and made proteins and viruses the research object of his structural analyzes in the following years. Bernal belonged to Erwin Schrödinger , Niels Bohr , Max Delbrück , Walter Friedrich and a number of physicists who made contributions to modern life sciences over the past century.

In 1937 he was elected a Fellow of the British Royal Society . In the same year he accepted the chair of physics at Birkbeck College in London. In 1937 his son Martin Bernal was born, who later became a sinologist . He was also scientifically involved in the preparations for Operation Overlord , the landing of the Allies in Normandy in 1944.

In 1945 he was honored by the British Royal Society for his research achievements with the Royal Medal ; the US government awarded him in 1947 for his service in World War II the "Order of Freedom with Bronze Palms". Bernal was a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR , Hungary , Poland , Romania , Bulgaria , the CSSR , the GDR and Norway . He was also an honorary professor at the University of Moscow and an honorary doctorate from the Humboldt University in Berlin and the Société Francaise de Mineralogie. In 1953 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize of the USSR, in 1959 he received the Prize of the International Grotius Foundation for the Dissemination of International Law.

His scientific work focused above all on the structure of simple and complex substances, from carbon compounds, metals and water to vitamins, hormones, proteins and viruses. Bernal dealt with the X-ray structure analysis of crystals and biochemical substances and created a theory of the structure of liquids. Bernal published more than two hundred scientific papers and documentations. His students include several famous crystallographers and structural biologists, such as Nobel Prize winners Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz .

He is famous for his Bernal Sphere , presented in 1929 , the model of a space station that is supposed to offer its residents permanent and long-term living space. In addition, he dealt with the social relevance of science and the philosophy of science . He dedicated a large part of his life to the intertwining of society and science and has covered this topic in numerous lectures, books, articles and radio programs. For many years, Bernal was Chairman of the Presidium of the World Peace Council before he had to retire from this role in 1965 due to a serious illness.

In the first half of the 20th century he was one of the intellectual pioneers and pioneers of crystallography and modern life sciences. At the same time and in parallel, he has been involved as a scientist and political intellectual since the 1920s in the practical-political debate about the social problems of his time. The questions of war and peace, the development and functions of the sciences as well as the public responsibility of scientists and intellectuals were the central socio-theoretical and political-practical topics of reference before, during and after the Second World War.

As one of the fathers of the science of science and a science policy oriented towards social needs , he has also been involved as a science politician in discussions about the development and management of science in Great Britain since the 1930s. His science- centered understanding of society was given the name “Bernalism” by his opponents . As a scientific advisor, he not only worked for various British institutions, but was also involved in the founding of UNESCO and in the institutionalization of the scientific systems in the young nation states (including India and Ghana ).

The Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Brandenburg awards the John Desmond Bernal Prize to young scientists in honor of Bernal . He is also the namesake for the Bernal Islands in Antarctica.

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personal data
SURNAME Bernal, John Desmond
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British physicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 10, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Nenagh , Ireland
DATE OF DEATH 15th September 1971
Place of death London