by Andrew Brown
The Social Function of Science was original, lively and topical: there had been several editorials in Nature over the previous year or two on the social relations and responsibilities of science, and the ideas in the book reflected a view increasingly held in the science world that scientists should not be content to pursue their intellectual vocation in isolation. The book found immediate favour with Bernal’s contemporaries like Blackett, Needham and Zuckerman. At Caltech, ‘Pauling devoured the book, made it a topic of discussion in his seminar classes… and sympathized with most of its message.’82 The book also reached a wider audience, and a review in The Spectator stated: ‘No other book of this range and vision is going to appear for many years. It is the testament of one of the few minds of genius of our time… It is a unique book and contains an accumulation of knowledge and a passion for ideas that are not likely to be combined again in one man for a long time to come.’ Less effusively, the New York Times called it ‘a provocative and valuable book which is badly needed’.
There were a few critics, however, and none more pointed than Michael Polanyi. Describing the book as an ‘able and powerful treatise’, Polanyi identified its central theme as ‘the passionate desire to put science into the consciously organized service of human welfare’.83 While Polanyi granted that Bernal was not following an orthodox Marxist line, he remained suspicious of Bernal’s apparent defence of the freedom of science. Polanyi found Bernal lacking on the crucial point of how science can be directed in order to benefit human welfare. He cited the development of the electric discharge lamp as an example of the defect in Bernal’s thesis. This humble street lamp was, in Polanyi’s opinion, the only practical invention to follow directly from the quantum theory developed between 1900 and 1912, by such luminaries as Planck, Einstein, Rutherford and Bohr. He posed the question as to how Bernal’s central planning authority, if it existed in 1900, would have guided those men to discover the atomic theory in order to improve street lighting to the level required twenty years later in connection with the popular use of motor cars. ‘And then the crucial question: Supposing the likely case that the scientific world controllers had not performed this miracle of foresight, would they then have had to reduce their support of the investigations which were leading to the discovery of atomic structure?’84 By skirting the central point in his own thesis, Bernal was, in Polanyi’s opinion, succumbing to use of Marxist propaganda, rather than relying on the power of truth, and this behaviour could only result in the ‘merciless oppression of intellectual liberty’.
Polanyi objected strongly to Bernal’s relentless criticism of capitalist institutions and constant praising of Soviet Russia. It seemed to Polanyi that nowhere was scientific thought oppressed so comprehensively as in the USSR because ‘the thrust of violence is guided here by Marxism, which is a more intelligent and more complete philosophy of oppression than is either Italian or German fascism’.85 As a result, ‘many well-known young [Soviet] scientists have been imprisoned in the course of the last year, no one knows why or for how long. Their names can be mentioned only in a whisper.’ That Bernal did not even mention their plight as a whisper in his book, drew a withering rebuke from Polanyi: ‘Dragooned into the lip service of a preposterous orthodoxy, harried by the crazy suspicions of omnipotent officials, arbitrarily imprisoned or in constant danger of such imprisonment, the scientist in Soviet Russia is told, from England, that the liberty which he enjoys can only be appreciated by living it. Since the terms of this liberty prevent him from answering his British colleagues, I have taken it upon me to point out the anomaly of the situation.’
By the time The Social Function of Science appeared in 1939 there were already the unmistakable beginnings of ‘big science’ in the USA. There were gigantic hydro-electric schemes to bring energy to the Western states, Du Pont was transforming nylon from a laboratory specimen into a commercial product through a huge industrial research project, and, within the University of California, Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley was building cyclotrons for high energy physics research. All these large-scale endeavours would be brought together in the wartime Manhattan Project – a military engineering project of unprecedented complexity and size. After the war, the model of large teams of scientists and engineers became the dominant fashion in particle physics, defence research and the electronics industry (e.g. Silicon Valley). Writing twenty-five years after the publication of The Social Function of Science, Bernal stated that the scientific revolution had entered a new phase – it had become self-conscious: ‘This is now recognized not only among scientists or among men of general education but in the world of private business and of state finance: research itself is the new gold field.’ The scale of big science in terms of its financing, its multifaceted complexity and its demands for specialized personnel forced scientists ‘to confront the world outside their disciplines’;86 not exactly in the way Bernal prescribed, but nonetheless resulting in a social consciousness he surely welcomed.
The historic advances made in biological sciences after the war, especially under Bragg’s avuncular eye at the Cavendish Laboratory were, by contrast, achieved by determined individuals like Perutz or by small groups, most famously the Watson–Crick duo. The twenty year period after 1945 likewise saw revolutionary changes in medicine, such as effective anti-tuberculosis drugs, open-heart surgery, kidney transplantation, all of which were developed through the single-minded efforts of a few dedicated individual scientists and doctors.87 None involved central planning or large collaborative teams. The Human Genome Project was certainly big biology, and fulfilled many of the notions promoted in The Social Function of Science. Sage would have been even more enthusiastic about human proteomics, which has the goal of cataloguing all the body’s proteins, describing their three-dimensional structures and the way they interact with one another. X-ray crystallography will remain a key tool in this present day exploration of Bernal’s original dream, but it will be done by robots, who will not first squint at crystals under a microscope and imagine how the atoms might be arranged.
9
Scientist at War
In the summer of 1939, Bernal returned to the United States for the first time since he had been taken there as a small boy by his mother. As before, California was his main destination, but now he was invited to give a series of lectures at Stanford University. These were part of the celebrations organized by the University to mark the centenary of the theory that all living things, plant and animal, are composed of cells. At the end of June, Bernal gave lectures on successive days to the Pacific Division of the American Academy of the Advancement of Science on the structure of proteins, and to the American Physical Society on the X-ray studies of plant virus particles. After the fourth-of-July holiday, he took part in a four-day meeting at Stanford on colloids.1 On the first day of the conference, Sage presented a theory in which he attempted to relate the dynamic process of cell division, mitosis, to the physical mechanism of the protein molecule that formed the characteristic cell structure known as the mitotic spindle. His talk was reported the next day in the New York Times under the cryptic headline ‘Links cell splits to protein crystal’ and the subsequent account gave readers the impression that Bernal was making an original and significant contribution to cell biology.
Following the Stanford conference, Bernal undertook a tour for the Progressive Education Association, talking to teachers at workshops in Chicago, Ohio and New York. He wrote to Fankuchen at the end of July2 complaining about the one hundred degree weather and 100% humidity, and mentioned that, except for four days, he had given two lectures a day since arriving in the country. During his educational workshops, Bernal was elaborating proposals that he had originally made in The Social Function of Science. He was concerned with the need for science to become a central component of general education and at the same time addressed the question of how the humanities could be brought to bear on the teaching of science. Keeping science and the humanities rigidly separate, stifled intelligence and criti
cism, and resulted in citizens who understood so little of the major influences on their lives. In his view, there were two main, overlapping objectives in science education:
‘to provide enough understanding of the place of science in society to enable the great majority that will not be actively engaged in scientific pursuits to collaborate intelligently with those who are, and to be able to criticise or appreciate the effect of science on society.
to give a practical understanding of scientific method, sufficient to be applicable to the problems which the citizen has to face in his individual and social life.’3
Bernal thought the inability to transmit to students the scientific method had been the greatest defect in traditional teaching and in order to rectify this, ‘every science teacher and every science pupil must be to some extent a research worker’. The scientific method could be appreciated only by using it. Science now offered the prospect of improved material living conditions, but the world needed to develop more advanced social and economic policies: ‘the confusion and struggle of our own times is largely the result of the inability of an economic and political system which grew up in an era of small trading and handicraft industry to deal with the new possibilities of large-scale mechanised industry and transport, which by their very nature imply a far more highly organised and planned society… If we fail to educate people to think about this, our present difficulties will grow worse, until they culminate in the miserable serfdom of fascism, and the wars which are fascism’s only answer to the difficulties they cannot cope with. Science and education are still powerful weapons for the defence of democracy, and for making possible the extension and development of democracy in the direction of an ordered, yet free, co-operative community.’4
Sage spent most of August in New York sharing an apartment with ‘L’.5 He also met Jean and Iris again – Iris was Iris Barry,6 a diminutive woman with black hair and striking blue eyes. In her Bloomsbury years, she had been the painter Wyndham Lewis’ ill-used lover, and she moved to the USA in 1930. She was now the curator of the film library at the Museum of Modern Art. Iris and Sage had many friends in common – Ivor Montagu and John Strachey for example – and she also shared his love of conversation. Bernal’s engagements as an educational consultant were over by mid-August and he was then able to enjoy upper New York State, visiting the Finger Lakes and Ticonderoga. He returned to the city at the end of the month, in preparation for another series of lectures to be given to the International Congress on Microbiology and then at the Rockefeller Institute. His trip was meant to end in Boston on September 12th with a talk to the American Chemical Society on protein structure, but with the declaration of war now seeming inevitable, he cut short his visit and dashed back to England. He wrote a letter to Edwin Cohn, the Harvard biochemist, who would have been his host in Boston, regretting that:
Events seem to have decided things and any co-operation in the protein field will have to count out most if not all Europe from now on. I am sorry because it seemed as if we might have contributed something to the solution of the main problems. I shall not be able to touch it for a long time, and I do not think anyone else here will either. My only hope is that it may be possible to get it well started in the States through Fankuchen, who I am sending over with all my materials to carry on if he can find some means of doing so.7
By the time Bernal returned to London, blackout precautions were already in place in anticipation of German air raids. He transferred from his office at Birkbeck to the ARP Technical Department, a new research unit that had taken over the Forest Products Research Station, Princes Risborough in Buckinghamshire. The Thames Valley would become an important locus of wartime activity, offering good access to the capital without providing any obvious targets for enemy bombing. For this very reason, Margaret Gardiner, at the time of the Munich crisis, had rented a two-bedroomed cottage at Maidensgrove,* near Henley-on-Thames. In the summer of 1939, her duties with FIL came to an end because the spirit of the country was now anti-fascist; she decamped from London with her young son, Martin, and domestic staff, Agnes and Ully. In September they were joined at Maidensgrove, for a short time, by Brenda Ryerson and her son. On the third weekend of the war, all were reunited with Sage. Under the terms of the recent Nazi–Soviet Pact, once the Germans invaded Poland from the west, the Red Army soon advanced from the east to a pre-arranged demarcation line. This was one of the leading stories that weekend, and when she heard about it, Margaret commented, ‘Russia is as bad as Germany.’ Sage did not argue with her openly, but quietly explained to Brenda that it was just the Soviets reclaiming territory that they had lost at the end of the Great War.8
The British Government had used the period following the Munich Agreement to step up its civil defence measures, in particular issuing gas masks to the public and constructing steel bomb shelters. As a Nature editorial had remarked in May, ‘Great Britain is now alive to the risk of being unprepared to meet attack from the air’9 and it was obvious that effective protection would need to be provided for the civilian population both at home and at their places of work. To make such provisions, basic data were required on the effects of explosion on different types of structures. Information was lacking on the physics of shock waves – the nature of the pressure changes and how they were transmitted through buildings or through the ground. The state of ignorance on the physiological effects of blast was, if possible, even more complete. About the only scientist to have pronounced on these matters was Haldane, on the basis of his informal observations in Spain. Writing in biblical style, he likened the shock waves from the explosion of a big bomb to the blast ‘of the last trumpet which literally flattens out everything in front of it… It is the last sound which many people ever hear, even if they are not killed, because their ear-drums are burst in and they are deafened for life. It occasionally kills people outright without any obvious wound.’10
The formation of the Civil Defence Research Committee, under Anderson’s driving, in May 1939 was intended to correct the prevailing ignorance about explosions, starting with the physical aspects. At the first wartime meeting at the end of September, Reginald Stradling was able to announce that five committee members (including Bernal) were working at the Research and Experimental Headquarters at Princes Risborough. Much work was already in hand, and two of the engineering professors had shown that framed buildings needed ‘surprisingly little strengthening to resist debris loading’ – the shortage of timber and steel, however, meant that there would be little chance of reinforcing existing buildings.
Bernal’s own work was presented as a paper to Sub-Committee A on the physics of explosions. He had been thinking about the novel problems of how to measure temperature, pressure and velocity at the centre of an explosion. At the very centre, the temperature would exceed the melting points and even the boiling points of most substances so that spectroscopy from a distance would have to be used, but within a few centimetres the temperature would fall to between 3,000 and 1,0008 C.
By placing a number of small pieces of select material near the charge, it should be possible to see on recovery and subsequent microscopic examination the maximum temperature to which they had been exposed, and by the thickness of altered material the time during which they were exposed to this temperature. The method is essentially similar to that of measuring meteorites’ temperature in the upper atmosphere by the thickness of the layer of fine crystal iron melt surrounding them.
His idea for measuring pressure was to detonate explosives in evacuated copper spheres and then make comparisons with the pressure of air that would cause the spheres to burst. This notion received short shrift from Sir Geoffrey Taylor, the Cambridge mathematician and expert on fluid mechanics, who chaired Sub-Committee A: ‘I do not think that pressures can be estimated using copper cylinders in the way suggested by Bernal. If you pump up air into a copper cylinder the cylinder will expand in radius till at a certain radius it will burst. If you try to introduce air at higher pressures you canno
t do it because the container has already burst’!11 Taylor then presented his own mathematical treatment of the way shock waves are reflected by and also bend around a wall – he used Fourier analysis in a way that would have been very familiar to Sage from X-ray crystallography. Two months later, Sage wrote to Paul Ewald, now working in Belfast, and offered him ‘a nice problem’, which G.I. Taylor thought insoluble, about the events subsequent to placing a sphere containing gas at 3,000°C and 10,000 atmospheres pressure in an infinite ocean of elastic solid. Sage ended the letter with the hope that ‘Belfast is sufficiently peaceful for you to treat this as a piece of abstract physics, without any immediate application in your neighbourhood.’12
