by Andrew Brown
Pasteur spent the best part of the next decade studying la dissymétrie moléculaire, and this lead him to cross over into the virgin territory of microbiology. His work on asymmetry led him to believe that there was a ‘profound line of demarcation between the mineral and organic worlds’ defined by some cosmic asymmetric force that in biomolecules produced either right-handed or left-handed molecules. ‘Almost imperceptibly he modified this idea in the course of his biological work, replacing it with that of life as a unique chain of beings, each one being asymmetric and each one passing its asymmetry to the next.’51 Sage, while recognizing that Pasteur ‘was absolutely correct in saying that the molecular complexity of living things or even of the products of life were of a completely different order from anything reached by non-living matter’, reminded his audience that Pasteur had slightly overstated his case. He had predicted, for example, that a crystal of albumen could not exist because its structure would be so complicated that it could not crystallize. ‘We know now that in this he went too far; proteins do crystallize.’ Sage used one of his favourite diagrammatic forms, that of a branching tree, to illustrate how early nineteenth-century science provided the tap root of Pasteur’s discovery, which then grew branches into twentieth-century science, with its widespread ramifications. One of the branches was labelled crystal chemistry, and carried the names of the Braggs and Kathleen Lonsdale amongst others. Yet the branch was severely pruned: the name Bernal, and the first structural pictures of proteins and viruses, is missing.
Bernal remarked in his lecture that Pasteur’s great discovery, unlike say Röntgen’s later discovery of X-rays, was not immediately taken up by other scientists. In part this was because only Pasteur had the chemical and crystallographic knowledge to develop further ideas, but also because scientists of the day tended to communicate sporadically by letters or through personal visits. As he wrote in The Social Function of Science, in those days the number of workers was so small that there was a reasonable possibility of acquiring knowledge from one’s contemporaries, but by the Second World War the very quantity of scientific information had made its diffusion an enormous problem, with which existing machinery had utterly failed to cope. Even though in his opinion, three-quarters of the material did not deserve to be published at all, there was still the need to ensure that ‘every scientific worker, and for that matter every member of the general public, receives just that information that can be of the greatest use to him in his work and no more’.52 He thought the present system of journals of lengthy papers was cumbersome and inefficient and while the full details should be available on demand, what was required was a wider distribution of short abstracts or summaries.
The war had subsequently shown that efficient information services were vital, when dealing with novel subjects and a rapidly broadening front of knowledge. The traditional, passive role of libraries as repositories of knowledge was no longer adequate to meet the needs of active researchers. Bernal conveyed these thoughts to a conference of the Association of Specialist Libraries and Information Bureaux in September 1945. He thought the twin aims of a modern information service should be to send the right information in the right form to the right people, and secondly to arrange that facts of whatever diverse origin, bearing on any particular topic, should be integrated for those studying that topic. This would represent a great improvement over the current position where ‘the research worker receives in journals and books a very large number of facts that are of no use to him at all but which have to be ploughed through’.53 He thought that the primary unit in scientific communication should be the individual scientific paper dealing with a particular subject: it should certainly not be the scientific journal of a learned society that ‘consists essentially of a number of papers which have in common only the fact that they were submitted at the same time’.54
The Association of Scientific Workers, responding to suggestions from Bill Pirie, had come up with its own proposals for a radical overhaul of information services.
In the proposed scheme, each country would have a centre of scientific publication and exchange which would receive from societies papers already passed by referees as suitable for publication and lists of members to whom papers from any part of the world on specified subjects or groups of subjects, should be sent. The national centres would act as clearing-houses for these papers, arranging for their internal distribution and sending others in blocks in appropriate numbers to the clearing-houses in other countries for distribution to the scientists there. Payment of a subscription to one society would entitle the subscriber to the services of the whole organization.55
Over the next year or so, there were sporadic papers from various organizations and individuals on the themes of a national information service and the distribution and use of scientific information. At Bernal’s suggestion, Ken-drew, now a doctoral student in Cambridge working with Perutz, conducted the first survey of the use of scientific literature at British universities. He found that there were severe delays in publication due to paper shortages, a lack of typesetters in the printing industry and the energy crisis of 1947.56 These delays, coupled with the enormous number of papers submitted for publication, meant that there was wasteful duplication as scientists attempted to make pre-announcements of their work through preliminary notes and letters, while the definitive papers were held up. Towards the end of 1947, the Royal Society decided to air the whole issue at a conference and appointed Bernal as a member of the organizing committee.
The winter of 1947–8 was another dreary period, with food rationing and energy shortages still prevailing. Geoffrey Pyke, the inventor of Habbakuk, had turned his mind to the coming National Health Service. The elusiveness of public health policy exasperated him; he had come to a fundamental conclusion that no one knew the correct time for making future economic plans – should it be five years, a decade or fifty years? He felt abandoned by Bernal at the end of the war and was depressed. Pyke stored boxes of documents in Margaret Gardiner’s garden shed and on one occasion threatened to commit suicide there to punish Sage. Margaret changed the padlock on the shed.57 In February 1948, Pyke took a fatal overdose in his rented rooms in Hampstead. Sage wrote obituaries for the Guardian and The Times. Describing Pyke as ‘one of the greatest and certainly the most unrecognized geniuses of the time’, Sage defined his personal tragedy as the possession of ‘abilities of such an order that they could only be expressed in action on the vastest scale and yet he was constitutionally incapable of directing the action of others’.58 Pyke’s despair about the inertia of the world was summed up in his motto ‘nothing must ever be done for the first time’.
The Royal Society Scientific Information Conference was held in the summer of 1948 with over two hundred scientists and librarians from Britain, the Commonwealth and the USA in attendance. About 45 papers were received from delegates and circulated in advance so that the discussions would be informed. One, from Bernal on a ‘Provisional scheme for central distribution of scientific publications’ caused a furore. It extended the ideas put forward by the AScW and was intended to ‘overcome the major disadvantages of the present system of publication and provide a more rapid, cheaper and more rational system of distribution’. What Sage’s paper did was to threaten the role of the learned societies in producing the majority of scientific journals, and they were outraged. A consortium that ran the gamut from the Anatomical to Zoological Societies sent a memorandum ‘to place on record that for the fields of science which we represent we consider that the proposed scheme of central publication and distribution of scientific papers is undesirable and would also interfere with the statutory and accepted aims of individual societies as free centres of interest and encouragement of research’.59
It was not just the learned societies attacking Bernal’s ideas: John Baker and Sir Arthur Tansley, two founding members of the Society for Freedom in Science, were quoted in The Times, describing Bernal’s proposed scheme as ‘totalitarianism’.60 Pirie had previou
sly dismissed their objections as those of ‘reactionary biologists saying they wanted their chaotic publications left alone’,61 and there is no doubt that the bitterness of their criticism was occasioned by personal dislike of Sage. Baker had been a trenchant critic of his ever since the publication of The Social Function of Science and had written a ‘Counter-blast to Bernalism’ in the New Statesman in the summer of 1939. It was this piece that led to the formation of the Society for Freedom in Science in 1940. Sage replied to Baker and Tansley, accusing them of spreading undue alarm. He stated that the ‘real object of my own scheme was not centralization but better service to scientific readers’.62 He thought that the two biologists did not realize that ‘the object of scientific communications is not merely to publish scientific papers, but to see that they are read by those who might profit from them. The present chaotic abundance of scientific publication ensures, as effectively as any imaginary system of control, that a large number of papers should not be read.’63
Sage was unable to convince the press that he meant no harm to scientific discourse. Several weekly publications, such as The Economist and the Observer, worried about the infringement of the tradition of free scientific enquiry. A Times leader denounced Professor Bernal’s ‘insidious and cavalier proposals’, and printed a letter describing his scheme as ‘contrary to all which British scientists have always held sacred. It appears to embrace many of those fundamental principles upon which the Nazi scientific information service was based and which were developed during the Hitler régime.’64
The Royal Society’s President, Sir Robert Robinson, deplored the ‘premature propaganda in the popular Press’ and the relish with which it anticipated ‘a clash of ideologies and the probable conflict between the planners and those who don’t want to be planned’.65 Bernal’s paper had been pre-circulated and was printed in the conference proceedings, but he withdrew it from discussion ‘on account of the misunderstandings about the status, nature and scope of these proposals’.66 While this may have been partly to avoid unproductive argument on the conference floor, it was mainly because the results of Kendrew’s questionnaire (presented by Bernal) showed that the mode of distribution of papers to individuals played such a small part in scientific communication that it would be a waste of time at the moment to attempt reform. As the physicist, Neville Mott, had pointed out in committee weeks earlier, physicists relied almost exclusively on library journals; Sage realized that the major effort needed to be directed towards improving library services, not on the distribution of papers to individual subscribers. At the opening of the conference, Bernal, as he had in his letter to The Times, explained that he was not wedded to any particular system but just wanted to ensure ‘the satisfaction of the user and the advance of science’.67 These two objectives were not independent but neither were they synonymous: an individual reader might be satisfied with a slow and incomplete service, but the confusion and inefficiencies of the present system acted ‘as a continuous brake to the progress of science’. In a humorous plea for planning rather than trusting slow evolution, Sage reminded his audience:
Many races of animal have died out as the effect of overmuch evolution in some particular direction. The horns of the Irish elk, admirable as weapons for mutual slaughter, turned out in the long run to be a disadvantage when the animal was pursued by enemies against which they were of little value. At the present moment the confusion and multiplicity of scientific publication is being met by the creation of new journals and the multiplication of papers containing substantially the same facts in order to achieve adequate circulation.68
Bernal’s various suggestions had little immediate impact in Britain, but they were read with interest by a young American, Eugene Garfield, who was just embarking on a career that would transform scientific communication and the exchange of information. For him the 1948 Royal Society’s conference proceedings became ‘a bible’, and in particular Sage’s ‘idea of a centralized reprint center was in my thoughts when I first wrote about the yet nonexistent S[cience] C[itation] I[ndex] in Science in 1955’.69 One of Bernal’s insights was that scientists are not trained to retrieve published information that might be useful to them, and that an ideal system should deliver that information with minimal effort on the consumer’s part. Garfield sensed that such a result could be best approached by using computers to generate indexing terms that effectively described the contents of a paper, avoiding the duplication, cost, confusion and tardiness of human indexers. During the decade from the mid-fifties, he brought his ideas to fruition in a series of ever more ambitious information tools culminating in the SCI. He found Bernal to be encouraging during its infancy, while ‘others found all the reasons that it couldn’t work’,70 and Sage was a member of its editorial advisory board for the first few years. Apart from recognizing Garfield’s monumental achievement in producing an information retrieval system that was multi-disciplinary, comprehensive, easy to use and up-to-date, Sage was the first to draw attention to its sociological implications as a way to monitor trends in science, whether on a national, institutional, or disciplinary basis. In 1975, Garfield dedicated the first large-scale statistical analysis of journals ‘to the memory of the late John Desmond Bernal, whose insight into the societal origins and impact of science inspired an interest that became a career’.71
Bernal’s fundamental contributions to X-ray crystallography were generously recognized by Sir Lawrence Bragg, in his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in the summer of 1948.72 Reminding his audience that no one had done more than Bernal as an explorer and pioneer, Bragg said:
Time and again, when reviewing some branch of X-ray analysis which is now very active, we have to acknowledge that the first critical experiment was due to his inspiration. Settlers have moved in to farm the land, but he has been the pioneer who pushed the frontier forward; one may add that, like all true pioneers, he becomes impatient and restless when the new country is developed and moves to fresh fields!… In the early days we painstakingly examined X-ray diffracted beams one by one with an ionization chamber. Highly accurate analyses are now made by the far more rapid method of recording all the beams on a photograph plate. The method itself was not new but it was Bernal who showed us how to systematize and docket the observations and draw logical and far-reaching conclusions from them about the architecture of complex compounds. … It was he who first obtained a regular diffracted pattern from a protein crystal… and he advanced further to study the scattering by the very large-scale regularities in virus preparations… his work only gave an indication in each case of what might be discovered, but it made the first steps possible.
While this was a kind tribute from Bragg, Bernal had no intention of resting on his laurels and was still energetically plotting the future of crystallography. At the Royal Society meeting on scientific information in 1948, Sage approached Olga Kennard with an idea for systematically logging new crystal structures as they were solved by X-ray analysis. Olga studied as a research student with Perutz in Cambridge and had just moved to London to work for the Medical Research Council. Bernal saw the limitations of single scientific papers that asked and answered one or two questions about one or two crystal structures, and he thought that by integrating the data from individual studies in a systematic way, radically new information would emerge. Until such combinatory analysis became possible by computer, Olga devised an index card system where structural characteristics were denoted by having holes punched at certain positions. When she wished to retrieve structures with common features, such as hydrogen bonding, she could do so by the simple device of inserting a knitting needle through the holes in the cards. A few years later, Bernal suggested that the three hundred or so structures that Olga had registered should be published in a book. From such simple beginnings, the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre would slowly grow.73
The Nuffield Foundation gave £5,000 annually to Bernal’s department for the five years after the
war, (which does not sound much, but was double the MRC annual grant to Bragg’s new research unit at the Cavendish). By 1949, Bernal was writing to the Master of Birkbeck about the impossible congestion of research and teaching activities in Torrington Square. He was given permission to make use of a static water tank (used in the war for fire fighting) at No. 23. This was a cubic space with sides about 60 feet long that became the lab for Booth’s computer group. Bernal’s fiftieth birthday in May 1951 gave his staff an opportunity to celebrate his leadership and to reflect on their achievements over the first quinquennium. From the electronics department of the Biomolecular Research Laboratory, Werner Ehrenberg remembered how they all pretended that they had to work under difficult conditions, at first with no fixed home, and then with the move into bomb-damaged accommodation with ‘floors half burned, windows blasted out, water only available next door, electricity from a point in the cellar’.74 While he had joined the chorus of complainers, he secretly thought their situation offered supreme advantages, not least because of a ‘“boss” who always pretended to know so much less of the matter in hand than you did, but always knew enough to see the tremendous importance of your projects’.
A map on the front of the staff report showed that the Birkbeck scientists came from eighteen countries around the globe. There were reports from the physics groups still working at the Breams Buildings site on Theoretical Physics (Furth), Nuclear Physics (Siday), and the Cosmic Ray Group (George) who had been chasing new sub-atomic particles in venues as varied as Holborn underground station, a colliery in Somerset, the Jungfraujoch and at Dakar, near the equator. There were of course summaries from Carlisle on the Organic Section, Jeffery (Cement Section) and Booth (The Computer Project). The Nuffield Foundation had agreed to increase its funding to £8,000 per annum for a further four years, but by 1951 Bernal was seriously concerned about keeping such a varied and expanding department on the rails. He wrote to the new Master, John Lockwood, in February that ‘the situation in the teaching of crystallography for the degrees of MSc and PhD will be extremely serious unless steps can be taken in the near future to provide more space and some equipment’.75 In September, Bernal proposed that crystallography be established as a separate sub-department. Although it was called a physics department, Kendrew came to regard Bernal’s post-war Birkbeck unit as the prototype for all Institutes of Molecular Biology, with its computing department, and its electronics group dedicated to improving X-ray tubes for the structural study of proteins and nucleic acids.76
