J D Bernal: the sage of science
Andrew Brown Oxford University Press, 562pp, £25
ISBN 0198515448
A couple of days after D-Day, the scientist J D Bernal, who had played an important part in planning the landings, went ashore at Arromanches himself and, catching sight of a group of French nuns, tried to engage them in conversation. In his diary he records with disappointment that his polite greeting "was received with frozen and taciturn virtue".
The nuns were probably wise to scuttle away, for they are pretty well the only women to cross Bernal's path in the first 250 pages of this marvellous book - blood relatives aside - whom he does not take swiftly to his bed.
Though we hear little of him today, Bernal was a globally important figure in the mid-20th century, both as scientist and political activist, and he proves a biographer's gold mine on those terms alone. However, his sexual antics are so extra-ordinarily compulsive that they sometimes steal the show.
As a young man in Cambridge and London, as he builds his reputation in the field of X-ray crystallography, he shuttles from Dora to Sylvia, from Magda to Pearl, from Naomi to Dorothy (that's Dorothy Hodgkin, later a Nobel prizewinner), not forgetting Eileen (whom he married) and Margaret (who bore his child). What- ever his trick was (and to judge by the photographs he was no oil painting) he had them tumbling like ninepins. He is still in his forties when we read of a club formed of women who have never been to bed with him: only two pass the membership test, and one of them is soon obliged to resign. Even 20 years on from that, a young male recruit to Bernal's lab has to be warned that whenever he hears two sets of footsteps going up to the boss's flat above, he must discreetly make himself scarce.
No less amazing, in its way, is Bernal's rampant communism, which he acquired between the wars and wore stubbornly on his sleeve until death in 1971, by which time the effort of denial, in a man of wit, humanity and towering intelligence, must have been barely endurable. Bernal, it seems, believed in scientific communism in every possible sense: to him the world, and his own life, were gigantic experiments, in which the testing often went to destruction.
His politics, his writings and his rarely disputed status as a scientific genius (he was in many ways the godfather of molecular biology) made him first a national and then a global figure. A peace activist on the far left, in one memorable passage he attends an anniversary event in Peking and meets, in short order, Mao, Khrushchev and Ho Chi Minh, playing the intermediary between them. A page or two later he is having tea with Nehru, advising Nkrumah and receiving an invitation to visit Cuba from Che Guevara. And Picasso and Pablo Neruda were personal friends.
All this, and science too. Bernal may never have won a Nobel prize, but quite a few who did, including Hodgkin and the DNA men Watson and Crick, were quick to share the credit with him. Again and again as the story unfolds we see the Sage (as he was known even in his twenties) throwing open doors through which others pass to greatness and, interestingly, he never seems to have envied them.
Andrew Brown, previously the biographer of the puritanical physicist Sir James Chadwick, could hardly have found a less similar subject, and Bernal leaps into life from his pages, not as a bounder and a dogmatist, as you might guess, but as a strange sort of one-eyed hero. As the women found, he is hard not to like.
The great wealth of source material Brown has unearthed yields up a story that is intense, busy and luridly coloured, and reminds us forcibly of aspects of the past century that we too easily forget.
Brian Cathcart's most recent book is Fly in the Cathedral: how a small group of Cambridge scientists won the race to split the atom (Penguin)
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