by Andrew Brown
Millikan carried the tube with the pepsin crystals bathed in their acidic, mother liquor back to Cambridge, in his pocket. As Millikan expected, Sage was delighted with the present for these were the best protein crystals he had ever seen. He immediately took one crystal from the tube, mounted it on his X-ray camera and photographed it. To his enormous disappointment, there was no diffraction pattern. Bernal then took another crystal and examined it under the polarizing light microscope. It showed birefringence – a double refraction pattern characteristic of crystals that results from polarized light travelling at different speeds as it passes through the crystal in different directions. Then came the crucial realization – as the pepsin crystal dried out, it lost its birefringence which told Bernal that it had become disordered. He needed to take X-ray photographs of the crystal in its wet state. He sucked a single crystal into a thin walled glass capillary with a few drops of its mother liquor and sealed the end with a flame. Now the X-ray analysis yielded a rich pattern of slightly blurred spots that extended all over the films. Sage was ecstatic and spent the night wandering about the streets of Cambridge, imagining how much information about the structure of proteins and about their functions would be unlocked if only these photographs could be interpreted in every detail.
Dorothy Crowfoot had been experiencing stiffness and pain in her fingers, the first symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, and was away from the laboratory for a few days. As soon as she returned to Cambridge, Bernal asked her to take more X-ray photographs of the pepsin crystals and together they began to derive the space group and unit cell dimensions of the protein. A letter was sent to Astbury, who had carried out his own study of pepsin over a year earlier. He had obtained some pure but small crystals from the American laboratory of John H. Northrop, and took powder photographs in the dry state. At the time, he informed Bernal that the pepsin gave ‘a good X-ray photo, consisting chiefly of two broad rings’78 from which he deduced that pepsin consisted of essentially straight peptide chains. Now confronted by the much more convincing X-ray diffraction patterns from Bernal’s laboratory suggesting a globular or spherical shape for the molecule, Astbury immediately wrote to congratulate Sage on the ‘fine news about the pepsin crystal. I think it must be right too.’79 Quickly Bernal and Crowfoot sent a letter to Nature80 announcing the first X-ray photographs of a soluble protein.
Gowland Hopkins had shown that the biochemical reactions that sustain life in cells are made possible by enzymes, which are soluble proteins. Now Bernal and Crowfoot had proved that one of these enzymes, pepsin, was not just an amorphous colloid but had a definite three-dimensional shape. It was not possible at that time to be more precise about the arrangement of atoms in the pepsin molecule, but surely the structure might hold the key to how pepsin exerted its enzymatic effect. Taken together with Astbury’s work on the fibrous proteins, these were two crucial pillars on which the edifice of molecular biology could be constructed. In the same month that Bernal and Crowfoot’s findings were published, Astbury, in a letter to Sage, wrote what was probably the first job description for a molecular biologist: ‘perhaps a physiologist would be best, but he must not be the romantic biologist, but one who thinks or wants to think, in terms of molecular structure, and is not likely to wreck my apparatus, and will not ask me too often what cos theta is.’81 He was excited about the future, and recognized that Bernal, whom he affectionately regarded as ‘the most unreliable fellow in the whole of crystaldom’ was likely to play a crucial role. Knowing only too well Sage’s wayward nature, Astbury made the following plea: ‘I feel if you and I do not make the most of biological crystallography, we should have our respective bottoms kicked – and if we do make the most of it, then I think things are bound to work out well in the end, in spite of the machinations of nuclear physicists. Please let me know if you discover anything more exciting, and if not for my sake, then for the sake of the proteins and structure analysis, do make an effort to answer this letter, or at least attend in some way to what I am asking you to do.’82
6
Soviet Pilgrims
Sage and Eileen were a politically active couple during their London years, but when they returned to Cambridge in the autumn of 1927, Eileen could not easily resume her Labour Party work and Sage’s first priority was to organize his new department. Although most of his political comrades from undergraduate days such as Dickinson, Hutt and Montagu had moved to start careers in other places, Maurice Dobb was an economics don at Trinity College and poised to become the most influential communist in the University. While Sage may have let his CPGB membership lapse, his affiliation was never in doubt or concealed. One can speculate that having renounced the Catholic Church, which once offered him such comfort, Bernal was eager for any alternative system of beliefs that would bring a comparable level of certainty to his life. In Microcosm, Bernal recognized the integrative nature of his own mind, and it is not surprising that all-encompassing philosophies like Freudianism and Marxism appealed to him. The combination of the two isms, each with its closed ideology irrefutable by discordant facts and each undermining the bourgeoisie, was fashionable in intellectual circles of the day.1
There was another, more direct, threat to the stability of British society in the late twenties. The economy, already limping from the self-inflicted wound of returning to the gold standard in 1925, was knocked to the ground by the repercussions of the Wall Street crash of 1929. British exports fell by more than half, and unemployment, starting from a relatively high level of one million, rose on a monthly basis to reach almost three million by the end of 1931 – one in five workers.2 The resultant misery and widespread hardships were enough to make even seasoned politicians doubt the future of a system that had failed its people so lamentably. Ramsay MacDonald, the Prime Minister, addressing the annual Labour Party Conference in October 1930 was driven to state: ‘It is not the Labour Government that is on trial; it is Capitalism that is being tried… It has broken down, not only in this little island, it has broken down in Europe, in Asia, in America; it has broken down everywhere, as it was bound to break down. And the cure, the new path, the new idea is organization – organization which will protect life not property… organization which will see to it that when science discovers and inventors invent, the class that will be crushed down by reason of knowledge shall not be the working class, but the loafing class.’3
The reference to science and organization in the same breath by the Prime Minister was a notable conjunction, and no doubt encouraged any scientists listening to believe that they would in future have more political influence. Stimulated by this prospect and the prevailing economic depression, Solly Zuckerman decided to assemble an informal club of lively young academics to explore how their expertise might be useful to society at large.4 The founding members were mostly scientists, (Bernal, Haldane, Needham, Lancelot Hogben, Julian Huxley), or economists (including Bernal’s old friend Dickinson, and two Oxford men Hugh Gaitskell and Roy Harrod). The club was soon christened the Tots and Quots, after a Latin tag provided by Haldane (quot homines, tot sententiae), and met on an irregular basis at various Soho restaurants selected by Zuckerman. Club membership was limited to twenty and lived up to the essence of its name: ‘so many men, so many opinions’. At an early meeting, Gaitskell made the point that scientific research resulted in improved technology, more efficient production, and ultimately transformed social values. In his view, the fact that scientific research was supported both by private capital and public funding confirmed its implicit social value. His ideas did not find favour with Bernal, Haldane or Hogben, who were not impressed with the notion of willingness to pay as a yardstick for social worth. Although the discussions were always lively and generally free from cant, the scientists tended to argue as a block and Zuckerman recorded his concerns about, what seemed to him, their uncritical belief in Marxist theory: ‘Marxism, as expounded particularly by Dickinson, [is] likely to end in illiberalism and rigid dogma because of a failure to recognise the psycho
logical inequality of people.’5
The deteriorating economic conditions also led to a political awakening in the undergraduates arriving at the British universities from the late 1920s onwards. Blessed with the clarity of youthful vision, the solution seemed obvious to many of them – the Soviet Union. It was a propitious time for Bolshevism: the chaotic violence spawned by the 1917 Revolution had abated and its replacement by the systematic violence of the state was not yet apparent. Where MacDonald in 1930 was calling for central organization, Stalin had already set the first Five Year Plan in motion in 1928 and was promising to leapfrog the world’s trading nations by establishing the world’s most industrialized and egalitarian state. While the radical undergraduates typically came from solid middle-class backgrounds or from well-known liberal families and had attended public schools, they were not abashed to support communism and Russia. A disproportionate number of them came to Cambridge, and Trinity College was their epicentre.6 Once there, they would come to the attention of Maurice Dobb, the eminence rouge, as well as the less obtrusive figure of Anthony Blunt, a Fellow in Art History. Trinity’s senior scientists were the apolitical knights, J.J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford; but Peter Kapitza, the Russian physicist, held regular meetings in his rooms (the Kapitza Club) that were attended by many politically active young physicists. Glenn Millikan, descended from old New England stock, represented the same anti-establishment strain amongst Trinity’s biological scientists.
The 1929 intake of Trinity freshmen included Harold (Kim) Philby, a reticent young man who came to read history, joined the CUSS, became its secretary, and at the beginning of his third year decided to switch to economics after being impressed by the ideas of Dobb. Another Trinity freshman of 1929 who made a more immediate splash was David Haden Guest, the brash son of a Labour MP. He came to study mathematics and became deeply interested in logic and the philosophy of mathematics (taught by the newly arrived Ludwig Wittgenstein). He decided to spend his second year at the University of Göttingen. While there, he witnessed several street fights and became alarmed by the nascent threat of the Nazis; he took part in a communist-led protest march and was arrested. After two weeks in solitary confinement, he was finally released after going on a hunger strike. He returned to Trinity in the summer of 1931, firmly committed to revolutionary Marxism as the only way to beat fascism and avoid war.7
That summer also marked an important turning point for Bernal. His epiphany came at the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in London. What might have been a jejune affair, held in a lecture hall of the Science Museum, was galvanized by the unexpected arrival of a delegation from the Soviet Union. The group of eight was led by Nikolai Bukharin, a perennial favourite of Lenin’s, who as a leading member of the Politburo had devised most Bolshevik policy from 1925–7, with Stalin as head of the party Secretariat providing the ‘organizational muscle’.8 In 1929, Bukharin succumbed to Stalin’s drive for absolute power and lost his place on the Politburo as well as the editorship of Pravda. By 1931 he was relegated to the minor post of director of research under the Supreme Economic Council, and although vilified as a ‘Right deviationist’ by the paranoid Stalin, his credentials as a leading intellectual figure of the Russian Revolution and a staunch opponent of capitalism were enough to endear him to enthusiastic socialists in London. The same reputation was sufficient grounds for the Daily Mail to mount a Red Scare story in an attempt to embarrass Ramsay MacDonald and the Labour Government, already tottering under the pressure of a run on the pound that threatened the solvency of the Bank of England. Under a headline ‘Moscow Hater of Britain now in London’, the paper portrayed Bukharin as ‘a red revolutionary politician’ who was intent on ‘world revolution in general and the overthrow of the British Empire in particular’.9
Bukharin brought with him a seven-man group that included N.I. Vavilov, the plant geneticist, who was President of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, A.F. Joffe, the leading Soviet physicist, B.M Zavadowsky and Boris Hessen, two philosophers of science. Since the Russians were last minute attendees at the Congress, (they had dramatically flown from Moscow two days before the meeting started), no time had been allotted to them to speak. Although a Saturday-morning session was added to accommodate them, there was a cultural impasse: they had come prepared to speak for several hours, but the English moderator vigorously rang a ship’s bell to restrict them to twenty minutes each. To ensure that their material reached its intended audience, it was suggested to Bukharin that a collection of their translated papers be made available. With the resources of the Soviet Embassy, what the Manchester Guardian christened ‘The Five Days’ Plan’ swung into operation and a bound volume, Science at the Cross Roads, appeared within two weeks. The foreword to this work was intended to leave the bourgeois scientist in no doubt that he was trapped in an inferior system:
In Soviet Russia absolutely new prospects are opening before science. The planned economy of socialism, the enormous extent of the constructive activity… demand that science should advance at an exceptional pace… In the capitalist world the profound economic decline is reflected in the paralysing crisis of scientific thought and philosophy generally.10
The single paper that made the greatest impression on Bernal, Needham and Crowther was Hessen’s ‘The social and economic roots of Newton’s Principia’. Until then, Newton had been regarded by most as the model of a scientific genius, who pushed forward the bounds of understanding, certainly by standing on the shoulders of others, but in the main as a result of his own creativity. Hessen’s thesis was an audacious one – that Newton, far from living his life in a vacuum, was responding to the needs of seventeenth-century entrepreneurs so that while he was drawn to the stars and the planets, the roots of his work were nourished by the practical needs to understand navigation, ballistics, mechanics, metallurgy and so forth.11
Readers of the Conservative weekly, The Spectator, might have been surprised to read a two-page report of the Congress the following week, penned by Mr J.D. Bernal12 who, they were reminded, had previously contributed to a series on ‘The challenge to religious orthodoxy’. The reason Sage was able to slip the occasional essay into such an unlikely magazine was that Celia Simpson, (a friend from the 1917 club and an ardent socialist), worked there, nominally as a secretary: she was fired a few months later for being too left-wing.13 Describing the Congress as ‘the most important meeting of ideas that has occurred since the Revolution’, Bernal relayed some progressive remarks from the English contributors (e.g. that the history of ideas was traditionally ignored in favour of kings, parliaments, battles and treaties that are but proof of the collective stupidity of man), but when it came to the history of science compared to the Russians, in his opinion, the English were ‘essentially amateurs’. His immediate sense was that the meeting had been a failure:
The time was too short, the gulf between the points of view too great, for there to be any real understanding. The Russians came in a phalanx uniformly armed with Marxian dialectic, but they met no ordered opposition, but instead with an undisciplined host, unprepared and armed with ill-assorted individual philosophies. [The Russians’] appeal to the dialectic, to the writings of Marx and Engels, instead of impressing their audience, disposed them not to listen to the arguments that followed, with the feeling that anything so ungentlemanly and doctrinaire had best be politely ignored.14
Bernal was certain that it would be unwise to ignore the Soviet ideas in the long run, for the present system of bourgeois science ‘tied as it is to academic and impoverished universities and to secretive and competitive industries and national governments’ was appallingly inefficient and not worth preserving.
Although the British Home Office regarded Bukharin as a ‘back number’, they did take the precaution of intercepting telegraph messages from the Soviet Embassy during his stay. Like Bernal, the Soviet delegation did not feel as though much was achieved in terms of exchanging ideas at the meeting, but they r
egarded its chief success as ‘getting in touch with the progressive left wing’ and forcing dialectical materialism to the attention of young scientists like Hogben, Needham and Guest.15 Curiously, Bernal was not once mentioned by name.
Any Spectator readers who persevered to the end of Bernal’s article were faced with the rhetorical question: ‘Is it better to be intellectually free but socially totally ineffective or to become part of a system where knowledge and action are joined for one common social purpose?’16 For his own part, Sage had come to the conclusion that the notion of intellectual freedom was an illusion, and thought it high time that intellectuals abandoned their ‘dreamland of art and science’.17 He recognized that intellectuals as a group were more likely to indulge in entertaining debate than to agree on a common basis for effective action, so that he was prepared to accept the loss of status demanded by the Communist Party in the pursuit of supporting the workers in their struggle. He did not expect the subjugation to Party doctrine at the expense of free thought to be an enjoyable exchange, and was not heartened by the existing Party memberships: ‘The Russian members are admittedly heroic but ruthless in politics and muddled and inefficient in economics, while those in bourgeois countries are both fanatical and neurotic. The policy of the party is unnecessarily violent, the emphasis throughout is on hate not love… The propaganda is virulent and overstated… the communists invoke revolution, the very prospect of which with its attendant civil wars and famine is too horrible to be borne.’18 The brutish nature of class warfare was, though, inevitable since ‘the effective human driving force must be composed of those who have nothing to lose and know it’.19
