by Andrew Brown
It is for this reason that the great majority of scientists completely repudiate Professor J.D. Bernal’s statement… to the effect that the direction of scientific effort in this country is in the hands of those who hate peace and whose only aim is to destroy and torture people… The facts are that Professor Bernal is receiving a great deal of financial support for his own researches from public funds by way of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and the University Grants Committee, such funds being derived from taxes imposed on a predominantly private enterprise society; and if the direction of his scientific work is not in his hands the fault is clearly his.
It would appear that, as in a few other similar cases, there are two Professor Bernals: one is the brilliant natural philosopher of world-wide renown, the other a fervid convert to an extreme political theory. Such a perverse interpretation of the situation as regards research in Britain would never have been made by the former.50
Bernal’s response in a letter to the editor was good-natured but unrepentant.
Sir, – I can have no quarrel with Sir Edward Appleton reviving for my benefit the fantasy of Jekyll and Hyde, but I can protest that whatever my political views are they have not led me to talk palpable nonsense. When I spoke of the direction of science in capitalist countries – it occurred to no one that I might not be referring to Socialist Britain – the last people I had in mind were the scientists themselves or even the scientific administrators like Sir Edward Appleton. As the reference to profits in the same sentence shows, I could have only meant those politicians and business men, now for the most part in the United States, who control the general direction of science by deciding whether the money will be spent for peace or war. They have decided that 60 per cent or more of the total national expenditure on research and development should be spent on war science. The latest available figures are £300m. out of £500m. in the United States and £67 out of £110m. in Great Britain… Further, as the financial interests of these men are closely linked with war industries, as the Press and political figures allied to them openly treat of war as a method of containing or destroying Communism, I do not feel that I went too far in describing them as enemies of peace. Even now, in our desperate financial situation, we are not only maintaining but actually increasing the number of scientists in war service, and thus holding back indefinitely the possibility of technical improvements in our industry which alone would enable us to survive as a trading nation. I would not criticize the civil section of British scientific effort or suggest that in detail it is not perfectly free. On the other hand, I consider it grossly inadequate in scale and in effective coordination… Complacency rather than criticism is the real danger in British science today.51
While it was true that the USA was the main target of Bernal’s Moscow attack, he portrayed Britain as its obedient servant, and gave no sign to the Russians that they should regard Britain as a socialist state rather than as a decaying capitalist country. The BAAS had been keeping a vacancy on its council following its summer meeting. Sage sent them a letter in which he recognized that there had been room for misunderstanding in the press reports and gave an assurance that ‘it had never been his intention either to state or imply that the scientists responsible for the detailed direction of research in this or any other country were haters of peace’.52 The council deliberated over the full text of the Moscow speech and the letter before deciding not to re-elect him as one of their number:
The council recognizes the necessity of distinguishing between political statements of its members with which it has no concern and statements on the direction and use of science in this country, and the objection it took last August was solely to certain statements of the latter kind. These appear in Professor Bernal’s version of his speech, no part of which he withdraws, and in the view of the council its objections are not removed by his letter.53
Sage regretted their decision, which he thought was a political one that would do grave damage to the reputation and future work of the association. A group of his friends circulated a statement deploring the council’s decision, which was signed by 244 British scientists. Bernal’s response to the association stated:
The essential contention of my speech was that the political and financial direction of science in America and Britain was one towards war… Now the direction of science is a political and not a scientific question, and I cannot but feel that your council has been led in this matter to take up a position which is not in line with the interests and purposes of the association. They [the council] are by implication lending their support to a policy which I believe to be disastrous to science and humanity. This policy is one of using a scientific effort, far greater than is made available for improving the conditions of life of the people of this country, to produce new ‘scientific’ weapons clearly directed against the peoples of the Soviet Union. These people, a few years back, were our allies and but for their sacrifices, which were far heavier than ours, all decent scientists here would now be in concentration camps or dead.54
He suggested that the government’s bias towards the military applications of science had already lowered the standard of living for the British people and ‘checked the development of scientific teaching and research. It is hindering the applications of science to constructive uses in industry, agriculture, and health at a time when the very existence of the country as an independent power demands their increased use for these purposes.’55 What Sage failed to see was that the direst consequences of political doctrine on the function of scientists, pure and applied, were taking place in the USSR. Not only had the triumph of Lysenko undermined research in genetics and other biological sciences and led to agricultural catastrophe, but the Lysenkoists were now threatening a similar purge of the natural sciences to root out Western influence or cosmopolitanism, as it was labelled. Andrei Sakharov, who was working at the top-secret Soviet Installation on the development of a thermo-nuclear weapon, remembered concerted pressure, beginning in late 1949, to stop scientists ‘kowtowing to the West’.56 Under this official campaign, Russians were given credit for discovering or inventing everything, an absurdity encapsulated in a saying of the time, ‘Russia, homeland of the elephant.’ In 1950, a commission visited the atomic installation to check on the Party loyalty of the senior scientists. Among the questions Sakharov was asked was what he thought about the chromosome theory of heredity. His reply, ‘that the theory seemed scientifically correct’, caused some suspicious glances among the members of the commission, but Sakharov’s importance and reputation allowed this deviancy to be overlooked.57
Sergei Vavilov’s position as president of the Soviet Academy as well as running FIAN, the physics institute, put him under constant suspicion from the authorities. He died in January 1951, aged sixty; Bernal wrote his obituary for Nature. He summarized Vavilov’s major research contributions in physical optics, and also recognized his interests in the history and philosophy of science. Noting Vavilov’s position as ‘a deputy both to the Russian and Union Supreme Soviets’, Sage suggested that ‘his advice was taken in all problems involving science’.58 Describing him as a man of quiet dignity whose death was probably due to overwork, Sage evidently decided that any mention of Nikolai Vavilov would not be seemly.
His next obituary essay was far more controversial and, even at the time, objectionable. It came on the death of Stalin in 1953 and was entitled ‘Stalin as a scientist’.59 In retrospect, it is such a grotesque eulogy that friends subsequently writing about Sage have either ignored it,60 excused it on the basis of the mood of the moment,61 or suggested, on the basis of no evidence, that it was written by a ‘hack’ in ‘his entourage’.62 The flavour of the writing can be gathered from the following phrases, which seem to me to reflect Sage’s long-standing infatuation with Stalin and his insatiable appetite for communist propaganda.
The greatest figure of contemporary history… at the same time a great scientist… his wonderful combination of a deeply scientific app
roach to all problems with his capacity for feeling and expressing himself in simple and direct human terms… that great double transformation, the industrialization of the Five Year plans, and the formation of the collective farms is Stalin’s most enduring monument… shallow thinkers, philosophic defenders of ‘Western civilization’, have accused Stalin of being motivated by love of power, but to those who have followed his thoughts and words, the accusation is only a revelation of utter ignorance… Stalin’s concern for men and women also found expression in his concern for the advancement of oppressed people and nationalities… his thought and his example is [sic] now embodied in the lives and thoughts of hundreds of millions of men, women, and children… it has become an indissoluble part of the great human condition.63
Stalin died at the beginning of March; had he lived another month or so, he might have heard about the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA – a development that explained the molecular basis of heredity in a way that was incompatible with Lysenko’s theories. Such was the suppression of genetics in the USSR, the idea of the double helix was not given wide currency amongst scientific groups there until 1956. Bernal immediately saw the implications of the discovery and a year later had no hesitation in calling it ‘the greatest single discovery in biology’.64
The discovery of the definitive structure of DNA was made in Bragg’s MRC laboratory in Cambridge by Francis Crick, who had found his way there after failing to get past Anita Rimel at Birkbeck, and the American biologist James Watson, who had been recruited to the lab by John Kendrew. It is now a matter of historical record that in building their model, Watson and Crick gleaned vital clues from the X-ray diffraction work being done at King’s College, London by Rosalind Franklin. She and the other crystallographers at King’s had benefited from reading Sven Furberg’s PhD thesis, describing how in the DNA molecule, the plane of the bases was almost perpendicular to that of the sugars. This had led Furberg towards a helical shape for the molecule with the bases stacked like Astbury’s pile of pennies at its core. Indeed when he returned to Norway in 1952, Furberg constructed one model of DNA as a single helix that was tantalizingly close to the eventual Watson–Crick construct.65
The historiography of DNA began fifteen years later with the publication of Watson’s account of the discovery in his book, The Double Helix. There was an earlier manuscript, Base Pairs, that Harvard University Press considered too defamatory to be published. Kendrew sent a copy of that to Sage, who enjoyed it hugely. He wrote to Kendrew:
I have now read the book entitled Base Pairs by Watson. It is an astonishing production, I could not put it down. Considered as a novel of the history of science it is unequalled.… It raises many vital problems, not only about the structure of DNA but about the mechanism of scientific discovery which he shows up in a very bad light… In England it would be libelous in many places… I never met Watson before the discovery but if I had I could have told him quite a lot – what impressed me most is that he did not know, and apparently never tried to find out, what had been done already in the subject. He is particularly unfair in the contribution of Rosalind Franklin and does not mention her projection of the helical DNA structure showing the exterior position of the phosphate groups. I need not mention the complete absence of a reference to the work of Furberg which contains all the answers to the structure except the vital one – the double character of the chain and the H-bond base pair linkage.* effectively, all the essentials of the structure were present in Astbury’s original studies, including the negative birefringence and the 3.4 Å piling of the base groups. I should add in my own defence that my weakness was in what he calls the English habit of respect for other peoples’ work. There was a tacit understanding. I dealt with biological crystalline substances and Astbury dealt with messy substances… I was certainly wrong in this. Astbury was quite clearly incapable of working out the structure. The genetic importance of DNA was apparent to me long before from the work of Caspersson, which Watson hardly mentions. Watson and Crick did a magnificent job, but in the process were forced to make enormous mistakes which they had the skill to correct in time. The whole thing is a disgraceful exposure of the stupidity of great scientific discoveries. My verdict would be the lines of Hilaire Belloc:
And is it true? It is not true!
And if it was it wouldn’t do.66
Bernal was sure that the publication of Base Pairs would cause ‘a lot of heart burnings in scientific circles and particularly in England, but it makes very good reading and I think would make an even better film because it is so alive and dramatic’. When The Double Helix did appear in print two years later, Sage wrote a review that opened with a quote from Lucretius, De rerum natura. It is a passage that had he reflected on it two decades before, might have alerted him to the fallacies of Lysenko: ‘no species is ever changed, but each remains so much of itself that every kind of bird displays its own specific markings. This is a further proof that their bodies are composed of changeless matter. For if the atoms could yield in any way to change, there would be no certainty as to what could arise and what could not… nor could successive generations so regularly repeat the nature, behaviour, habits and movement of their parents.’ Sage explained that although Lucretius was writing about the changelessness of atoms, he could, as easily, be arguing for ‘the existence of unalterable genes’.67
Bernal’s name is mentioned only in passing in The Double Helix, which he thought was in keeping with his peripheral contribution. Watson referred to the ‘legendary’ scope of Bernal’s brain, and told how watching Crick react to the wartime paper of Bernal and Fankuchen on TMV made him realize that he had to understand the helical theory of X-ray diffraction. Crick, who came to know Bernal better, said that he was the first genius he met with consideration for the feelings of others.
In the later 1950s, Crick and others proceeded to elucidate the genetic code with its triplet base signals determining the sequence of amino acids in a particular polypeptide chain or protein. His reasoning was very like that which Sage had employed in 1931, when he concluded that three-dimensional replication of protein molecules was just too complicated to be a natural solution. Crick, unlike Sage, never considered a possible two-dimensional solution, but by then he knew ‘a lot more about proteins than they knew in 1931’.68 In 1957, Crick coined what he called the Central Dogma of genetics: not only do nucleic acids determine the specificities of proteins, but ‘once “information” has passed into a protein it cannot get out again. In more detail, the transfer of information from nucleic acid to nucleic acid, or from nucleic acid to protein may be possible, but transfer from protein to protein, or from protein to nucleic acid is impossible.’69 A gene became defined as a sequence of DNA that coded for a protein according to the Central Dogma: DNA!RNA! protein: this was almost a universally accepted and dominant concept for thirty years. Most of the experimental data were derived from the study of simple one-cell organisms like the bacterium, E. coli, where the Central Dogma still represents the essential story.
For higher organisms, including humans, the story has become far more complicated in recent times.70 It has been apparent for some years that only about 2 per cent of human chromosomal DNA codes for protein – the other 98 per cent was dismissed as ‘junk’. But the ‘junk’ DNA is proving to have an important regulatory role in gene expression. Some of it encodes for short RNA molecules that do not directly specify proteins themselves, but act as signals to alter the profile of protein production by switching coding genes on and off. This major new area of research is referred to as ‘epigenetics’ – a term first used by Bernal’s bald, pipe-smoking friend, Hal Waddington, in 1942.71 As Bernal wrote to Huxley in 1949, ‘in general all the facts of orthodox genetics are admitted, but the laws are considered far too simple an interpretation of the facts’.
Dorothy Hodgkin, musing on Sage’s gullibility about Lysenkoism, said it reflected the fact that he ‘held theories lightly’.72 Her opinion is supported by an essay he wrote
early in his career on ‘The irrelevance of scientific theory’.73 In this piece, Sage pointed out dual aspects of a scientific theory that tend to be different for scientists and laymen. Inside science, a theory serves ‘to organise existing knowledge and point the way to the acquisition of new knowledge… Scientific theories are usually taken as true by scientists for emotional reasons in order that they may feel a comfortable exhilaration at their work, but for the working scientist a particular theory is merely a popular champion to be abandoned and ridiculed the moment a new and more effective theory beats it in the field… [but outside science] scientific theories tend to turn into lay dogmas believed to be true on authority without the possibility of examination, and it is for this reason that it is the more necessary to examine into their origin.’ Although, as H.J. Muller wrote to a friend, J.D. Bernal had ‘one of the best, if not the best scientific mind in the world’,74 in the case of Lysenkoism, he fell into the role of a trusting layman rather than following the scientific method as he habitually would.
When it came to political theory, for Sage there was only Marxism. He quoted Stalin’s interpretation with approval.
Marxism is the science of the laws governing the development of nature and society, the science of the oppressed and exploited masses, the science of the victory of Socialism in all countries, the science of building a Communist society. Marxism as a science cannot stand still, it develops and improves. In its development Marxism cannot but enrich itself with new knowledge – consequently its various formulae and conclusions cannot but change with the passage of time, cannot but be replaced by new formulae and conclusions, which correspond to the new historical tasks. Marxism does not recognise immutable conclusions and formulae, obligatory for all epochs and periods. Marxism is the enemy of all dogmatism.75