by Andrew Brown
This was followed by an equally engaging discourse on topology, which Sage informed his audience was a branch of modern mathematics that derived from town planning: ‘It arose from the problem proposed in the eighteenth century at the Russian Academy of Science as to how to cross all the bridges in St. Petersburg without crossing any of them twice.’69*
At times, Sage might have wondered whether there was a topological solution to crossing North London without encountering one of his lovers. Eileen moved to Clifton Hill, well within walking distance from Margaret’s house in Hampstead. Sage would see her and the boys regularly and still go on summer holidays together – once to a holiday camp in Wales with the Malleson family. Joan Malleson was a gynaecologist and family planning pioneer who was Eileen’s closest friend. Her husband, Miles, a playwright and comic film actor, was also a good friend of Sage’s. While on a walk, the holiday party came to a derelict bridge over a muddy estuary; the iron support pillars of the bridge were full of eels, which could be seen only by precariously crawling along some railway ties. The Bernal boys were ecstatic about the adventure, but Joan felt that her eight-year old son, Andrew, was too small to be allowed to go. He was mortified and had a temper tantrum, which left him too exhausted to walk. Sage carried Andrew all the way back to the camp on his shoulders. He always felt an affinity with children and could talk to them with ease and mutual enjoyment. That summer of 1938, Bernal also spent time in Cornwall with Margaret, who had taken a house there for several months. He told her that he could not live with Eileen, but nor could he make a complete break from her. Margaret asked him about the boys and he stated, ‘I don’t believe in all this nonsense about paternity.’ She pointed out to him, ‘Well, you do seem to have a rather special sort of feeling about Martin.’ He replied, ‘That’s different, he’s a personal friend of mine.’70
Tensions grew between the two North London households. Eileen threatened to write to their friends saying that Sage had abandoned her. Joan Malleson wrote to him about Eileen’s profound emotional distress, saying that Eileen ‘feels your silence to be flippant and your attitude casual… you are deserting her and slighting her’.71 Joan suggested that he might try psychoanalysis, which he did with no success. There were also inevitable difficulties with Margaret, not to mention the irresistible attractions of her nubile domestic staff. At one stage, his presence at either house became unwelcome and he went to stay for a while with his sister Gigi, also living in London, before returning to Margaret.
If Sage was affected by emotional turmoil, it never seemed to interfere with his work. He was invited to give a series of evening lectures by Sir William Bragg at the Royal Institution on the ‘Molecular architecture of biological Systems’. In the first talk on 25th January 1938, he concentrated on the problem of scale: ‘The microscope cannot effectively study anything smaller than one hundred-thousandth of a centimetre, and chemical analysis anything larger than one ten-millionth. Unfortunately the structures of the greatest significance for the maintenance and the very existence of life lie precisely in this gap. The molecules of proteins, which are never formed except by living organisms, and without which life processes are impossible, have dimensions of the order of a millionth of a centimeter.’72 He then explained how X-ray crystallography was such a valuable technique for bridging that gap between chemistry and light microscopy. The crystallographer could build on the chemist’s knowledge of constituent amino acids and the chemical bonds that linked them and, by determining the symmetry of protein molecules, propose three-dimensional structures that were in accordance with all the known facts. He held up Crowfoot’s recent work on insulin as an outstanding example of this approach. Over the next four weeks, Sage treated his audience to a comprehensive survey of the field, taking in Astbury’s work on fibrous proteins, his own work on plant viruses, the importance of protein in muscle contraction and his ideas on enzymes.
Bernal moved to London permanently in 1938, when he took up the chair in physics at Birkbeck College. He succeeded Patrick Blackett, who had taken the Langworthy Chair at Manchester University, recently vacated by Lawrence Bragg. Birkbeck had been founded as the London Mechanics’ Institute and functioned for the best part of a century as a night school for intellectually curious young workers from modest social backgrounds. It was formally admitted as a School of London University in the 1920s, but its charter still required that its undergraduate students be ‘engaged in earning their livelihood’.73 The idea of a college catering to unprivileged students, who were bent on self-improvement, appealed to Blackett, a committed Fabian; his move there in 1933, when he was already the most highly regarded experimental physicist of his generation, surprised many of his colleagues. In the short period of his tenure, Blackett turned the Birkbeck department into one of the best in the country: a leading centre for cosmic ray research and a haven for emigré scientists from Europe. Sage was invited to apply for the post and sent in a curriculum vitae, which described his duties as the Assistant Director for Research and his major research interests in proteins and the structure of liquids. He felt obliged to point out that he had never taught a regular elementary course in physics, but in his teaching ‘tried to avoid stereotype and have attempted to bring into the course all material, however lately discovered, which will conduce to a greater interest and appreciation of essential principles. I have paid particular attention to practical work with the idea of developing a really experimental attitude towards scientific problems.’74 Bernal, like Blackett, was attracted by the radical tradition of Birkbeck, and the restriction of teaching to the evenings meant that the whole day was free for research.
On the day, 19th Ocotber 1937, that Bernal indicated that he was prepared to let his name go forward as a candidate for the Chair in Physics at Birkbeck, Lord Rutherford died unexpectedly, leaving a gaping hole in the fabric of British science. Lawrence Bragg, who had only just moved from Manchester to the National Physics Laboratory, was soon elected as the new Cavendish Professor, and naturally brought some of his crystallography team with him to Cambridge. Bernal took Fankuchen with him to Birkbeck, but Perutz remained in Cambridge. He sent Bernal regular progress reports on his haemoglobin work, but became increasingly concerned about his lack of university status and the question of financial support. Bernal sought to reassure him, saying that he would talk to Bragg, who already ‘gave me an undertaking that you would be looked after and I am sure that he will’.75 Months passed without Bragg visiting Perutz in the laboratory and eventually Perutz decided to make a direct approach, taking some of his haemoglobin photographs for Bragg to see. The impact was immediate and Bragg from that day became Perutz’s staunchest advocate. He wrote to Bernal: ‘I had a talk with Perutz this morning. He told me about his work on haemoglobin which interested me very much. I should like this line to continue at Cambridge if it does not interfere with what you are doing, and I gather from Perutz that there is no clash.’76 Bernal of course had no objection to Perutz continuing the haemoglobin research and told Bragg that ‘Perutz is an extremely capable worker, particularly on the experimental side, and his protein pictures are certainly the best that have been taken by anybody so far.’77 This was the dawn of the new era of molecular biology at the Cavendish Laboratory.
By moving from Cambridge to London, Bernal exchanged a lowly, leaking, hut in the courtyard of the Cavendish for Breams Buildings, a Dickensian thoroughfare between Chancery and Fetter Lanes, lined by dilapidated, tall, Victorian buildings. There were two laboratories given over to research, one in the basement and the other at the top of the building, which in Blackett’s time housed the large cloud chamber and Geiger counters that he used to capture cosmic ray tracks. Blackett moved all this equipment to Manchester, along with a handful of researchers. Bernal, in turn, transferred his X-ray equipment and cameras down from Cambridge. Just as the physical layout of Breams Buildings was awkward, the attitude towards research equipment had been penny-wise with the chief technician, Mr Dobb, begrudgingly parting with bits
of apparatus, much in the style of his counterparts at the Royal Institution or the Cavendish. At Birkbeck, he had hung up a large paper sign, which read ‘PLEASE RETURN TOOLS AFTER USE’. Blackett’s ‘League of Nations’ scientists had added their own translations underneath, and after the first years of Bernal’s tenure, the list included several dozen languages, including Urdu and Arabic.78 Blackett also left behind one or two researchers, including Werner Ehrenberg, a German refugee physicist, who walked with a severe limp as a result of childhood polio. The extrovert Fankuchen had no difficulties fitting into the cosmopolitan group, which soon expanded with the addition of an MSc Student, Harry Carlisle, (originally from Burma) and Käthe Schiff, already an accomplished crystallographer, who had fled her native Vienna.
As with any new professor, Bernal was expected to give an inaugural lecture. The title he chose was ‘The structure of solids as a link between physics and chemistry’ for which he scrawled some key terms in pencil but gave little thought until the appointed day, 1st December 1938. The chair was to be taken by Sir William Bragg, and that afternoon Sage decided to go to the Royal Institution to borrow some slides. While there, he bumped into Langmuir and spent the next several hours trying, unsuccessfully, to explain the deficiencies of the cyclol theory to him. Time was therefore tight when he returned to Breams Buildings, and instead of being able to rehearse his lecture he was swept off to a sherry reception in his honour by the Master of Birkbeck. He did manage to hand over his collection of slides to Fankuchen, who was to act as projectionist. According to Fan, ‘The whole way through the lecture the poor guy never knew which slide was coming next.’79 It seems unlikely that anyone else in the audience realized that Bernal’s lucid thoughts were being marshalled on the spot, and the following week he received a postcard from the editor of Nature asking for the non-existent transcript of the lecture.
Now that Bernal had achieved a certain standing in the scientific community, he decided that he would write a book exploring the role of science in contemporary society and seeking ways to remove those impediments that prevented science from fulfilling its enormous potential to benefit mankind. As a first step, he hired a part-time secretary to help with the book. He heard from Magda Phillips that a friend of hers, Brenda Ryerson, was looking for work. Brenda was a fellow communist, who had married a man wounded in the International Brigades in Spain. She had a newborn baby and, although she badly needed some money, was concerned that her husband could not cope without her at home. Sage was immediately sympathetic to her plight and suggested that her working hours could be quite flexible. So Brenda started on what would become The Social Function of Science,80 working erratic hours at Birkbeck or in Hampstead, with secretarial duties soon spilling over into the Association of Scientific Workers, and, after the Munich crisis, typing memoranda dictated by Bernal on science and national defence. She also found herself dealing with phone calls from various women anxious to talk to Sage, and in time would join the ranks of his lovers.81
When The Social Function of Science reached the galley-proof stage, Sage added references. He did this by telling Brenda the author, the name of the book or journal article and the date of publication: she found that he was seldom wrong by more than a year. The book was published in January 1939 and was divided into two main parts. The first ‘What science does’ is Bernal’s personal opinion and experience, buttressed by original economic data. The second ‘What science can do’ is his prescription for the future and relies on his imagination and politics. In the preface to the book, he gave clues to his motivation for writing it, noting a contemporary disillusion with science as a method of procuring continuous improvement in the condition of life. He attributed this to the psychological damage wreaked by the Great War and the later economic depression. Bernal started with an historical survey, which was not overtly Marxist in its language, but soon led to a rejection of the traditional view of science as a contemplative activity in which knowledge is sought for its own sake, in favour of one where science is driven by the material needs of society. Essential economic progress depended on improved technology, resulting from the application of science. Where the Victorian historian Macaulay had celebrated the success of science in multiplying human enjoyments and mitigating human suffering, Bernal was concerned that modern physical science had no more solved the problems of universal wealth and happiness than the moral sciences of the ancients. Bernal counted modern warfare, financial chaos and general undernourishment among the bitter fruits of science – ignoring the role of corrupt and inadequate political systems.
The sweep and detail of his treatise were unprecedented. He managed to create statistical data for some aspects, and, where quantification was impossible, relied on his own experience and judgement. Relative to its wealth and importance as a country, he noted, England ‘spends very little on science and makes less use of its potential scientists than do any other of the great Powers’. There was also a tradition in England ‘that science is felt rather than thought’ that had fared well in ‘the easy bits of science’, but which Bernal thought would be less successful in the future, when the problems would be less straightforward and would demand the use of systematic theory. He portrayed Rutherford exploring the structure of the atom ‘as if it were a kind of coconut shy at a village fair, [when he] throws particles at it and looks to see what bits fall out’.
The Americans possessed the English empirical character and had invented most of the world’s most useful devices. Where Great Britain spent about 0.1% of its national income on scientific research, the relative US figure was probably eight times higher, at around $300 million. Still, he did not believe that the American scientists were contributing proportionally more to the advancement of science, partly because of the higher costs in the US, and more subtly, because of the individual scientist’s need to promote himself in a society driven by worldly success: ‘American publications are if anything slightly more bulky than corresponding German ones, but, whereas in Germany one feels that it is just thoroughness for thoroughness’ sake, in America there is a suspicion that the position of a man may depend on the bulk of his published work.’
Concentrating on Britain, Bernal considered science research by the government and industry as well as in the universities. The two per cent of science graduates who escaped careers as school teachers or solitary, secretive work in industry or government and became academic researchers ‘have rather painfully to unlearn much of the inaccurate and out of date information acquired in the universities and to forget the rest’. While constructing the case for the inefficiencies and poor organization of science, Bernal recognized that it is extraordinarily difficult to impose discipline without snuffing out the originality and spontaneity on which scientific progress depends. He thought there were three main aims to be satisfied:
the entertainment of the scientist;
new understanding of the external world;
the application of that understanding to human welfare.
None of these was being widely achieved under the present haphazard arrangements, where development was driven by the need to make profits rather than by the needs of the great mass of the population. Many scientists were bitterly frustrated by lack of funding or lack of opportunity to cooperate with one another, and, for example, ‘the condition of medical research in this country is not only a disgrace but a crime’. Readers were reminded periodically that things were much better in the USSR, where for the past two decades science had been subjected to central planning and was integrated into the productive processes in order to meet human needs.
Bernal thus set the stage for the second part of the book: ‘What science could do.’ There must be a comprehensive reorganization of science, which ‘presupposes therefore a change in society itself’. He thought ‘the inadequacy of the scale of science is more immediately important than its inefficiency’ so that the prime requirement under any new system was ‘a very large expansion’ in activity. Sage’s expansionist mode l
eads him at one point to propose ‘unlimited sums for scientific research, that is, sums limited only by the ability of existing scientists to spend them’. Since the funds would not be used to increase scientists’ salaries and there was a limit to how much apparatus an individual could use, there would be an inherent limit on expenditure in practice. Whatever the overall budget set by society, the internal distribution of that budget between different subjects should be decided by consultations between representatives of science and national economists ‘as is already occurring in the Soviet Union’. Even if countries like Britain did not adopt a central command economy, Bernal thought that the financing of science could be placed on a better footing by publicizing the benefits that science could bring and by making more use of scientific and industrial councils to apportion funds. Once the role of science in advancing society became clear, there should be no difficulty in raising the modest sums necessary to maintain a flourishing level of research. Although Bernal acknowledged that, historically, the advent of capitalism led to an acceleration in early scientific development, he believed ultimately that the transformation needed to direct science towards the good of humanity ‘is incompatible with the continuance of capitalism’.
Bernal next set out to show how science could be organized without killing its necessary freedom and flexibility. He did not accept that science could not be planned because it ‘is in its very essence unforeseeable’. It was plain that there had always been an element of short-term planning in scientific research, while the longer term had depended on a mixture of tradition and opportunism. The challenge was to put in place an explicit long-term strategy that allowed for ‘the unpredictable nature of scientific discovery’. At any time, there might be subjects where advance was easy and rapid, while other areas of ignorance were left fallow. By allocating talented scientists to those neglected areas, the overall front of advancement could be broadened to the benefit of all. Central planning could also ensure a proper balance between fundamental and applied research. Disillusion with the destructive consequences of science in capitalist society would be overcome with the realization that science is the chief agent for social change. It offered not only the promise of a minimum level of well-being for all mankind, but beyond that the greatest possibilities for social and intellectual development. Science could transform society indirectly through the technical changes it brings about and directly through the force of its ideas: ‘The association of scientists in times of crisis with other positive and progressive forces is not a new phenomenon; it occurred in the age of Bruno and Galileo and again in the French Revolution.’ It seemed to Bernal that the task which the scientists had undertaken – ‘the understanding and control of nature and of man himself – is merely the conscious expression of the task of human society. The methods by which this task is attempted, however imperfectly they are realized, are the methods by which humanity is most likely to secure its own future. In this endeavour, science is communism.’
