by Andrew Brown
2. The Bernal children (Kevin, Gigi, and Desmond l. to r.) with their nurse, Daisy, and either Bessie or Aunt Cuddie in 1908
3. The eighty freshmen of Emmanuel College Cambridge, October 1919. Bernal is seated on the Senior Tutor’s left
4. Sage and his wife, Eileen Bernal (née Sprague)
5. Patrick Blackett as an Acting Lieutenant in the First World War. He arrived at Cambridge in 1919 in uniform
6. Sage, Sylvia Dickinson (née Barnes), Isidore Fankuchen (Fan), and H.D. Dickinson (l. to r.) at a British Association Meeting, Nottingham 1937. Sylvia married Dickinson, Sage’s Emmanuel friend, and worked as a Rockefeller research assistant in Astbury’s Leeds department
7. W. T. ‘Bill’ Astbury (1898–1961), the man Sage credited with coining the term ‘molecular biology’
8. Max Perutz (1914–2002) who joined Bernal’s lab in 1936 and determined the structure of haemoglobin
9. Bernal with Margaret Gardiner in the Alps, 1936
10. Dorothy Hodgkin looks on as Sage demonstrates Tobacco Mosaic Virus gel to Irving Langmuir at the British Association Meeting, Nottingham 1937
11. Dorothy Wrinch (1894–1976) whose cyclol theory of protein structure Bernal patiently discredited
12. Geoffrey Nathaniel Pyke (1894–1948) the begetter of Habbakuk, described by Sage as ‘one of the greatest and certainly the most unrecognized geniuses of the time’
13. A subdued Solly Zuckerman surveys damage in Tobruk harbour in February 1943, when he felt Sage had abandoned him
14. Photo-reconnaissance of a D-Day beach. The cap on the stake in the right foreground is a Teller anti-tank mine
15. Beach on D-Day+1 with vehicles stuck ‘like flies in amber’
16. Sage in ‘the very doubtful disguise of a naval officer’ for his aborted second visit to the Normandy beaches. Seated to his right is Capt. T. A. Hussey RN
17. Sage in Ceylon 1944 next to Lord Mountbatten (wearing his naval cap)
18. The Birkbeck crystallography research group in the Faraday Lab at the Royal Institution in 1946. From left to right standing: Sam Levene, Jim Jeffery, John Hirsch, Geoffrey Pitt, Helene Scouloudi; seated: Anita Rimel, Werner Ehrenberg, Desmond Bernal, Helen Megaw, Harry Carlisle
19. Sage meets Comrade Lysenko in 1949 but seems unable to look him in the eye. J.G. Crowther, the science journalist, is wearing the Panama hat
20. Margot Heinemann
21. 21–22 Torrington Square just before the houses were demolished in 1966. Bernal’s flat was at the very top of No. 21 on the left
22. Sage with Nobel laureates Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Sir C.V. Raman in India, 1950
23. Leading virus crystallographers at a conference in Madrid, 1956. Left to right: Francis Crick, Don Caspar, Aaron Klug, Rosalind Franklin, Odile Crick and John Kendrew
24. Sage and Linus Pauling (centre) in Moscow in 1957 for Oparin’s conference on the origins of life
25. Jane Bernal holds her parents’ hands as they march in support of the London bus strike, June 1958
26. Bernal listens intently as Khrushchev addresses the World Congress on General Disarmament and Peace for over 2 hours in Moscow, July 1962. Mme Blum is on Bernal’s left and Paul Robeson two seats to her left
27. Sage constructs his first ball-and-spoke model of liquid structure, confident that he will be interrupted every few minutes so that the model would be disordered
* Then the official name of O’Connell Street, site of the burnt-out General Post Office.
* William Rowan Hamilton (1805–65) married Helen Bayly of Nenagh in 1833, and they spent their honeymoon at the family farm, which Bernal visited as a schoolboy to look at diatoms.
* The prize was shared with a graduate student at Emmanuel, R.G.W. Norrish (1897–1978), later a Nobel Laureate for Chemistry.
* The wavelength of visible light ranges from 400 to 700 nanometres (1 nm = 10 9 m = 0:000 000 001 metre). One Ångström unit (Å) = 10 10 m.
† Although William Lawrence Bragg (1890–1971) was familiarly known as Willie, I will refer to him henceforth as Lawrence. The confusion caused by sharing his father’s first name was one reason that his remarkable contributions as a very young man were underestimated for many years, even though he was a Nobel Laureate.
* Francis Crick made the following comment when shown Bernal’s 1931 notes: ‘What an interesting quotation. How perceptive of Sage. I myself did not consider the 2-D case. But of course I know a lot more about proteins than they knew in 1931.’ (Letter to the author 14/12/01.)
* Alan Mackay informs me that Euler reported to the Academy in St Petersburg in 1735 on the problem of the seven bridges of Koenigsberg, which started the mathematics of topology.
* Some years later, Bernal was joking with friends about what titles they might take in the House of Lords. Lord Bernal of Maidensgrove was suggested, but Waddington suggested Maidensgrave would be more apt.
* Furberg had, in fact, suggested in a 1952 paper that he expected hydrogen bonds to occur in nucleic acids.
* Briareus, or Aegaeon, in Greek mythology, was one of the three hundred-armed, fifty-headed Hecatoncheires (sons of Poseidon and Gaea).
* A polyhedron is any solid shape bounded by plane or flat surfaces
* His OED credits include the printed use of ‘bugger’ in its colloquial sense from a letter he wrote to The Listener about a conversation between himself, Haldane and Carl Sagan.
* Romila Thapar, the General’s daughter, became one of India’s most distinguished historians.
* Described by Peter Zeeman in 1896, atomic line spectra are altered in a strong magnetic field.
* Thales of Miletus (c.560 BC) made predictions of eclipses (which Bernal thought were on the basis of earlier observations of the Babylonians) and believed that all matter derived from water, dividing itself into air above and earth beneath.
* A reference to Aesop’s fable ‘The frogs desiring a king’. Jove sent them first a large log, which they found they could dance on with impunity. The frogs asked for a real king who would rule over them. Jove sent a stork, who gobbled them up. ‘Better no rule than cruel rule.’
* The OM is the most exclusive honour, restricted to 24 members at any given time. Association with Bernal was no bar: Dorothy Hodgkin, Blackett, Mountbatten, Zuckerman, Perutz and Klug all received OMs.
