Bernal’s family were farmers in Nenagh, now in the Republic of Ireland. Brought up as a Catholic, he was educated at Stonyhurst and Cambridge, where he abandoned Catholicism and became (1923) an active member of the Communist Party.
In Cambridge, his first work on crystallography was done as an undergraduate on the mathematical theory of crystal symmetry.
After Cambridge, Bernal spent four years at the Royal Institution in London learning the practical details of X-ray crystallography from Sir William Bragg.
When he returned to Cambridge in 1927 he planned a research program to reveal the complete three-dimensional structure of complex molecules, including those found exclusively in living organisms, by the techniques of X-ray crystallography.
He first suggested the covalent nature of the metallic bond and wrote a masterly article on X-rays and crystal structure for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Later he used X-ray analysis to help inorganic chemists puzzle out the formulae of the sterols.
In 1933 Bernal succeeded in obtaining photographs of single crystal proteins and went on to study the tobacco mosaic virus. It was not, however, Bernal’s own achievements in crystallography, as much as those of his pupils and colleagues, such as Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz, that brought about the revolution in biochemistry and launched the subject of molecular biology.
In 1937 Bernal was appointed professor of physics at Birkbeck College, London. His attempts to develop the department were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Despite his known membership of the Communist party and against the advice of the security forces, Bernal spent much of the war as adviser to Earl Mountbatten.
In 1945 he returned to Birkbeck College and in 1963 was appointed to a chair of crystallography. In the same year he suffered a stroke and although he continued to work for some time, a second and more severe stroke in 1965 paralyzed him down one side and virtually ended Bernal’s scientific life.
His books include The Social Function of Science (1939), Science In History (1958), and the Origin of Life (1967).
Bernal speculated about the colonization of space and the construction of very large spherical space settlements in his futuristic 1929 work The Work, the Flesh and the Devil.
Biography of John Desmond Bernal (1901 – 71)
