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A scientific socialist
JD Bernal: The Sage of Science
By Andrew Brown
Oxford University Press, 2006, £12-99
Reviewed by
Niall Mulholland
JOHN DESMOND Bernal (1901-1971) was one of the most
inspirational, brilliant scientists of the 20th century. One of the star
‘red scientists’, JD Bernal’s pioneering work in the 1930s laid the
basis for modern molecular biology. He was nicknamed ‘the sage’ by
admirers for the breadth of his learning and depth and scope of his
insight into natural and social phenomena.
A lifelong supporter of the British Communist Party,
Bernal was a high-profile campaigner against fascism, atomic weapons,
and for the struggles of the oppressed in the colonial world. A talented
writer, Bernal popularised science and the relationship between the
scientific world and society, through books like The Social Function of
Science (1939) and Science in History (1954).
Andrew Brown’s new biography of Bernal is a very
welcome introduction to this great scientist and polymath. It details
Bernal’s early years growing up in Tipperary, Ireland, in a well-off
family. At an early age, Bernal showed a precocious talent for science,
devising his own laboratory tests. He also showed a taste for radical
politics. The public school boy argued with his family in support of
Sinn Fein members who, during the Irish ‘war of independence’, burnt
down neighbouring landlords’ estates.
While an undergraduate at Cambridge University,
Bernal’s first worked on crystallography, studying the mathematical
theory of crystal symmetry. He also became a committed socialist while
at college. After moving to London in the 1920s to work at the
scientific Royal Institution, Bernal attended the 1917 Club to "rub
shoulders with other young admirers of the Russian revolution". Along
with other left intellectuals, Bernal took part in many street protests
in the 1920s and 1930s. During an anti-fascist demonstration in London,
he recorded how JBS Haldane, a fellow famous scientist, made a solitary
charge at riot police and was beaten senseless.
Early in his career Bernal decided that x-ray
crystallography would turn out to be the most likely tool to reveal
details of the structure of matter.
Bernal was fascinated by the work of WL Bragg and his father WH Bragg,
(holders of the 1915 Nobel Prize for Physics), who pioneered the
development of x-ray crystallography. Bernal followed WL Bragg's
important research on the arrangement of atoms in crystals, and
concentrated on the x-ray analysis of organic substances.
His first success came in 1924, when he worked out
the structure of graphite. In 1927 Bernal took up the newly-created post
in structural crystallography in Cambridge and worked on the structure
of vitamin B1, pepsin, vitamin D2, the sterols, and the tobacco mosaic
virus. Bernal possessed the ability to transmit his enthusiasm to others
and to attract highly talented fellow scientists to work alongside him,
including Dorothy Hodgkin, Max Pertz, Francis Crick and Rosalind
Franklin.
In 1937, Bernal was appointed professor of physics
at Birkbeck College, London. On the outbreak of war in 1939, he joined
the Ministry of Home Security. With Solly Zuckerman, Bernal carried out
an important analysis of the effects of bombing. Later in the war, he
served as scientific adviser to Lord Mountbatten, the Chief of Combined
Operations. Bernal researched the physical conditions of the Normandy
beaches the Allies would land on in 1944, discovering many military maps
were inaccurate. All this war-time work was done while Bernal was one of
Britain’s best known Communist Party supporters.
Bernal was hugely influenced by the Soviet
delegation at the 1931 International Congress of the History of Science
and Technology in London, where the ‘Old Bolshevik’, Nikolai Bukharin,
and others argued that science should be seen in relation to the
development of production. This ran counter to ‘conventional’ belief in
the self-sufficient character of science. Bernal developed these ideas
in essays and books, arguing that science closely reflects economic
development and that it should be a guide to social policy.
But Bernal’s view that a non-capitalist society
could be guided by scientific rationality was severely tested in what he
regarded as the ‘socialist’ Soviet Union under Stalin. While big
advances were made under the planned economy in Russia, including
scientific advances, this was despite the absence of workers’ democracy.
Genuine scientific research and creativity was stifled or crushed under
Stalinism, a narrow, bureaucratic system that abhorred any semblance of
independent thought and initiative, particularly by the working class.
Bernal regarded science as an unequivocal
progressive force. He did not openly criticise the treatment of science
and scientists under Stalinism, or the false ideas of Trofim Denisovich
Lysenko, who held powerful official scientific posts in the Soviet
Union. In the 1920s, Lysenko made
extravagant claims that by treating seeds with temperature, moisture and
other simple techniques – so-called ‘vernalisation’ – he could
dramatically alter the seasonal patterns of crops and their yields. He
also claimed that the beneficial effects of these changes could be
passed on to subsequent generations, in other words, that acquired
characteristics could be inherited. Lysenko’s method, claims and
theories flew in the face of the developing science of plant genetics.
As the experience of Stalinist Russia (and the
capitalist west) showed, applying science to social questions also
requires democratic decision-making and accountability about priorities,
resources and needs. This can only be realised in a socialist society,
with a planned economy under workers’ control and management.
Brown gives a brisk, straightforward account of
Bernal’s scientific achievements, his colourful Bohemian life, and his
political commitment. But the biographer, a radiation oncologist, is
much better on science than on politics. Although Brown’s explanations
of Bernal’s scientific work, and his disputes with other, usually
conservative, pro-establishment scientists, are sometimes belaboured,
the author covers the ground adequately, taking non-scientists along
with him (most of the way). But Brown has no feel for the momentous
political and social events that Bernal lived through, and fails to
understand or explain the reasons for Bernal’s political trajectory.
Brown crudely equates Bernal’s Marxism with religion
and concludes that, "having renounced the Catholic church… Bernal was
eager for any alternative system of beliefs". The biographer also
falsely brackets Marxism with Stalinism. But the revolutionary socialism
of Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks was later crushed by a bureaucratic
counter-revolution, headed by Stalin. The rise of the Stalin clique to
power was due to the economic and cultural backwardness of Russia, which
was compounded by the failure of the socialist revolution to spread to
the more industrialised west.
All his adult life, Bernal was an unswerving
follower of the Communist Party, even when friends left over the great
purges in Russia, the Hitler-Stalin pact, or the crushing of the
Hungarian uprising in 1956. While he appeared to have private misgivings
about Soviet policy, Bernal never publicly aired any. The great
contradiction of Bernal is that this dynamic, multi-fielded scientist,
who brought a searching intelligence to his scientific endeavours, did
not take the same critical approach to the many unprincipled, cynical
twists and turns of the Kremlin, and its stooge Communist Party in
Britain.
Like thousands of other CP supporters, Bernal
remained loyal to a party and system whose leadership falsely claimed
the ‘authority’ of 1917 and who were able, for decades, to point to the
‘concrete social gains’ of the Soviet Union. Bernal was feted by CP
leaders and the Kremlin, keenly aware of his value to them as an eminent
pro-Soviet scientist. He visited Russia and met Soviet leaders,
including his ‘friend’ Nikita Khrushchev. After world war two, Bernal
was a sort of international ambassador for science and Soviet
Union-sponsored international campaigns. In his last years Bernal sat on
many committees and frequently travelled across the world, including to
Russia, China, Cuba and Eastern Europe.
From Brown’s biography we can see Bernal came to an
arrangement with the leaders of the Communist Party and the ruling
Stalinist elites in several countries. Despite his undoubted willingness
to take part in street campaigns, Bernal had an abstract approach to
class politics, and to vital questions like workers’ democracy in Russia
and party democracy.
But Bernal’s rich life also shows that in the 20th
century a generation of talented intellectuals broke with their
privileged class backgrounds to side with the socialist revolution. As
class struggle redevelops, and new mass workers’ parties grow, a new
generation of scientists, writers, artists and other intellectuals, can
be won to socialist ideas. The political life of Bernal will be highly
instructive for the next generation of radicalised intellectuals, as it
will also be for revolutionary workers.
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