J D Bernal

by Andrew Brown

  Sage left the Taj Hotel on the morning of 2nd January, after ‘a certain amount of difficulties about tipping the numerous beggars, dhobi men, porters, page boys etc. that surrounded our departure’.7 He drove south-east to Poona to attend another science congress, which Pandit Nehru, the leader of the newly independent India, was expected to attend. Sage knew Nehru well from pre-war Bloomsbury parties. That evening after the dinner, Nehru drew him aside and ‘we started a conversation on the proper utilization of science in India’. After ten minutes, they were interrupted by Nehru’s aidede-camp ‘who moved me onto the Governor’s wife’. She was ‘rather a terrifying character not at all fitting into the scheme of vice-regal propriety’8 and he did not succeed in escaping from her for the rest of the evening. Sage returned to his residence, and Nehru dropped in just before midnight with the artist Felix Topolski, who was staying with him in order to make sketches of India and Indian characters. Both men were tired and they held a rather ‘desultory and unsatisfactory conversation’.

  Bernal soon formed the impression that young Indian scientists were very keen and also tended to exaggerate the importance of foreign visitors. Word spread that he was writing a report for government, and one morning he was woken by a phone call from M.R. Patel, a dissident scientist, who dismissed governmental plans for organizing science as ‘moonshine’. In Patel’s opinion, Nehru displayed an over-optimistic attitude to large-scale projects, and corruption and nepotism were rife within his administration. At the Poona conference, Bernal lectured on structure of proteins, and attended the annual meeting of the Indian Association of Scientific Workers with Joliot in the evening. Following that meeting, he went to dinner with a colleague from the war, General Daya Ram Thapar, the head of the Indian Army medical service. They discussed the tensions between India and China, and Sage admired the General’s even temper as he was berated by his wife and daughter* for his opinions.

  The next three days were given over to sightseeing, with Sage taking a particular delight in the caves of Maharashtra, which involved some hot and steep hiking. The caves, cut into rock, are Buddhist monasteries that contain elaborate sculpture. He was taken to the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute where a few elderly learned scholars were preparing an edition of the Mahabharata, the epic Hindu text. The scholars had already been toiling for thirty years and expected to be finished in another sixty. Sage felt a pang of sympathy for them and noted that their labours received only ‘niggardly government support’.

  He flew from Poona to Aurangabad in order to visit the cave temples of Ajanta and Ellora. At the hotel after dinner, Sage played ping-pong, but ‘soon saw that we were getting in the way of a bevy of extremely charming young ladies. As we gave way to them, one of them came up to me and asked in French if she had the honour of addressing M. Joliot-Curie. I said I couldn’t quite be that, but we started a conversation and then when Joliot did turn up, I said, I would be charmed to introduce you but I don’t know your name and she said “My name is Miss Mistry.” It was in fact nothing mysterious… it is a very common Parsee name. The family consists entirely of ten Miss Mistrys…’9

  The following morning, they drove across the Deccan plateau, through villages of brick and mud and banyan trees to Ajanta, an old town with a great wall and magnificent gate. They walked along a gorge to get to the line of caves, which are cut into the hillside, and were greeted by the curator himself – ‘an earnest young man… whose tendency toward popular exposition rather spoilt the archaeological interest of the trip.’10 After driving the two hundred or so miles back to Bombay, Bernal flew to Calcutta with the Joliot-Curies.

  Calcutta struck him as little changed from his previous visit four years earlier, ‘as vast a city as ever with the open garbage piles in the road being nibbled at by the ever-present sacred cows, which wandered in and out of houses’.11 The city was living up to its reputation as the incubator of revolution in India, and Bernal sensed an atmosphere of danger due to bombthrowing outrages and frequent armed police raids. He visited Presidency College, where he was impressed by the quality of biochemical research on vitamins and hormones. He gave a lecture on building techniques at an engineering college before flying to Benares, a city where the buildings seemed to lean drunkenly and be about to slip into the Ganges. He watched people bathing in the river, unconcerned by the corpses being dipped in the water before cremation on the Ghat.

  From Benares he flew to Delhi, where he had dinner with an economics professor, who told him about the difficulties of financing foreign debt and the problems of industrialization. The economy was in a critical state, and short-term speculators hindered government planning. Sage lectured on the history and teaching of science, and visited physics and agricultural institutes. He had another unsatisfactory interview with Nehru:

  This was not a very happy affair because, first of all, he was himself obviously very depressed in his obsession for the Congress and secondly because I had nothing very encouraging to tell him about science or its applications. I asked him very pointedly what his real policy was and he answered me in the most evasive way, implying that he was not really a free agent and that he should be congratulated not so much on what he had done but what he had prevented from happening.12

  Bernal found time for a short visit to Ceylon, where once again he fell for the lush, green beauty of the landscape. He lectured to large audiences on the origins of life, building methods, and peace. Then he returned to Calcutta once more for a huge peace meeting, where he received an embarrassing number of garlands. His speech was interrupted by insects and ‘unrestrained loudspeakers from neighbouring houses’. He was able to watch the sunrise before flying home.

  Bernal made another major trip to the Eatern Bloc in the early spring of 1951. He flew in bad weather from Prague to Lwow in occupied Poland. There he was met by a woman from VOKS (the society for the promotion of cultural activity with foreign countries) and ate an austere Soviet dinner of strong sausage, biscuit and tea for ‘the excessive price of 12 roubles’.13 Things looked up after he arrived in Moscow and booked into the vast Hotel Metropol. The next day he visited a crystallography department that reminded him strongly of Birkbeck because the scientists were attempting to work amidst a crew of plasterers and painters – pieces of furniture and apparatus were pushed into odd corners of the laboratory. He visited the Ministry of Forest Plantation, where he was completely taken in by projects that were based on Lysenko’s specious theories. There was a visit to a superb historical museum where his eye was taken by daggers from Central Asia, dating from the third century, which had bronze blades and cast iron handles.

  For his first three evenings in Moscow, Sage went to the cinema (where the film was the usual dull Soviet fare about the grain harvest), the Bolshoi and a puppet theatre. He was enraptured by the puppet show, in which a university professor fell in love with a much younger champion swimmer. To impress her, the professor pretended to be a diver and performed a daring four-andone-half somersault dive, which resulted in him being carted off to hospital. The swimmer came to visit him, and when he confessed to being a university professor, he got the girl!

  There was a Soviet peace meeting going on, and he met up with the journalist Ilya Ehrenberg and Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet. They took the night train to Leningrad together and stayed in luxury at the Astoria Hotel. Apart from spending hours at the peace meeting, Bernal visited construction sites and scientific departments, squeezed in an evening at the ballet and a tour of the Hermitage, before returning to Moscow to attend a meeting of the Stalin Peace Prize jury. Sage wondered how many other men shared the peculiar distinction of taking part in committee meetings at the Kremlin, the White House and 10 Downing Street. He was taken to see the tower blocks of Moscow University being built with great speed by the Red Army. There were meetings with the Minister for Power Stations on electricity generation and supply problems, and on irrigation schemes.

  In the autumn of 1953, Sage led a delegation of British scientists, invi
ted to the USSR by the Soviet Academy of Sciences.14 The party included Dorothy Hodgkin, Olga Kennard and the Oxford mathematician Henry Whitehead. Sage flew into Moscow some hours later than the main party, and as soon as he arrived they were all swept into a grand banquet with the Soviet academicians. The numerous courses were interspersed by increasingly loquacious toasts and speeches.15 Sage then repaired to the grandest suite of rooms at the Metropol Hotel, at the end of a corridor two hundred yards long, where the pipes had to travel such a distance that there was never any hot water. Among the scientists Sage visited was Madame Olga Lepeshinskaya, then over eighty years old, who disputed the cellular theory of life and was a fervent supporter of Lysenko. He did not seem to register any objection to her preposterous theories, perhaps because they were embraced by the state. Sage made the now customary journey from Moscow to Leningrad on the night express. Olga Kennard remembers him coming straight from the Kremlin and sitting up all night drinking vodka as he talked about Stalin (who had died about six months earlier). When the train drew into the station, he said to her, ‘Olga, let’s creep out the back way and I will show you Leningrad.’ They walked everywhere and Sage showed her everything – the Hermitage, the architecture – while giving a tremendous exposition on the art and history of the city. In the end, he said ‘Olga, I think we had better go back because those poor people have been waiting for me.’ They returned to the station to find a welcoming party still standing there, clutching small bunches of flowers wrapped in newspaper.16 Later during the trip, Sage flew to Tiflis in Georgia to make a pilgrimage to Stalin’s birthplace.17

  Bernal was a frequent visitor to Hungary in the early 1950s, and was there as the official guest of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in April 1954. He gave three public lectures and visited most of the scientific and technical institutes in Budapest. The head of the physics department, Professor Lajos Jánossy, had worked at Birkbeck before the war and then transferred to Manchester with Blackett to continue research on cosmic rays. In Budapest he had a laboratory with meticulous temperature and air current controls, designed originally for cosmic ray work that he was now using to study quantum effects in electromagnetic fields. He was researching into the coherence of light and showed Bernal an elegant experiment demonstrating that there is ‘absolutely no correspondence between reflected and refracted waves in the light striking a glass mirror’.18 Sage was taken with the enthusiasm of the university lecturers he met, but sensed that science in Hungary was being held back by the continued after-effects of the war, language difficulties, and the large teaching load. The Hungarians’ contact with Soviet science could not yet replace, he thought, contact with ‘the science in the older capitalist countries’.

  The centre that impressed him most in Budapest was the Biomedical Institute, where he was fascinated by research on the structure and ageing of elastin, the rubbery protein that allows the lungs and blood vessels to stretch and relax. Elastin, a generally indigestible protein, is readily broken down by the enzyme, elastase, and the researchers in Budapest showed that this process was accelerated for aged elastin. The implication to Sage was that ‘the young or newly formed elastin is the most highly polymerized and that some kind of depolymerisation process, presumably some kind of chain breaking, oxidation, cross-linking or other break is occurring very very slowly with time. I saw an analogy with this and the process which diminishes the elasticity of the lens of the eye, also progressive and apparently quite normal. The problem is really an extremely interesting one, because it does suggest that there is, over and above any pathological ageing, a perfectly natural ageing of tissue itself.’19

  Sage had been in Hungary three years earlier and was struck by the improvements in the standard of living since his last visit; there was a common joie de vivre, people were well dressed and there were many excellent, popular restaurants. After the death of Stalin, the hard-line communist, Matyas Rakosi, was replaced as prime minister by the more liberal figure of Imre Nagy. Nagy had loosened state control of the news media and encouraged public debate about economic and political reform. Bernal was there for the Liberation Day celebrations on 4th April and enjoyed the folk dancing and the firework display over the Danube. Reflecting on the scientific effort in the country, he thought it was showing signs of promise, despite some inevitable unevenness and lack of organization. There were some canvassing a changeover to a more Soviet-style approach, but on balance Sage thought ‘they will have to find their own way to suit the conditions. I do not feel that an exact copy of the Soviet system is called for here. The major difficulty as I see it in Hungary, or indeed any country of that size, is the attempt to build on a set of natural resources which are inevitably limited and ill-balanced: in contrast, for instance with a very large country like the Soviet Union, where any imbalance locally is easily made up for by materials from somewhere else.’20

  In September 1954, Sage was in Moscow again to collect his Stalin prize at the Kremlin. In his acceptance speech, he referred to the success of the peace movement in laying the foundation of a permanent settlement and holding off war. He reminded his audience that, in an atomic age, men could no longer live in hostility to each other. ‘Friendship and cooperation became the conditions of survival’, he said.21 Once the stocks of fissile materials were released from military sources, he was optimistic that a rapid increase in available energy from atomic sources would be possible:

  That would mean first of all water where it was wanted through irrigation and pumping, unlimited steel and other materials, the end of hard toil and repetitive tasks, the cure of disease and the pushing back of life itself… We cannot allow it to be taken from us by a small group of narrow, embittered and frightened men who would rather hold this power back, would rather use it for destruction in order to preserve their petty interests, their own boasted way of life, which the new life would so completely surpass.22

  There were some frustrations attached to being a hero of the Soviet Union. He complained to his friend Ilya Ehrenburg:

  I have been given a room in a far too luxurious hotel… A programme has been worked out for the few days that I can spend in Moscow: a ride in the Metro, Gorky Street and on Sunday to see the architecture of the agricultural exhibition. This is my eighth visit to Moscow. I know a dozen clever, interesting people in this city, but instead of giving me the opportunity to talk to them, when there are so many engrossing things happening in the world, I am being treated like a sacred cow.23

  But there were compensations. Sage’s request for a personal interview with Khrushchev was immediately granted, and the meeting took place in the Kremlin on 25 September. Khrushchev, who had been promoted a year earlier to first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party had ruthlessly consolidated his grip on power. By the summer of 1954, it was becoming clear, at least within the USSR, that he was the new boss. With his old ally, Georgy Malenkov, Khrushchev had engineered the arrest of Beria in June 1953 and his execution six months later. He then set about eclipsing Malenkov, who had been Stalin’s heir apparent. Stalin put Malenkov in charge of agriculture after the war; in 1952 as Stalin’s mouthpiece, he announced that the grain crisis was over – a falsehood that Khrushchev would cunningly exploit. The 1952 harvest was, in fact, smaller than it had been before World War I.24

  In August 1953, with Stalin dead, Malenkov made some rather more enlightened suggestions to improve the woeful state of agriculture: the state should increase prices paid for produce, taxes should be lowered, and peasants’ smallholdings should be liberalized.25 Malenkov, whose two sons were both scientists, went even further, recommending a review of pure and applied science in the USSR. Later he would renounce Lysenko as a charlatan. Khrushchev, who was unwilling to cede control of agriculture to Malenkov, gave a major speech of his own at the Central Committee plenary meeting in September 1953, proposing even more ambitious changes. Without needing to refer directly to Malenkov, Khrushchev took every opportunity to remind audiences of the 1952 statement that the grai
n problem had been solved, whereas the official government statistics now pointed to a crisis in Soviet farming. During the spring of 1954, Khrushchev displaced Malenkov from the seat of honour at Kremlin meetings of the Presidium, and asserted his own authority.

  At his 1954 Kremlin meeting, Bernal’s first question was about the grain crisis, and the comments it had sparked in the West about the failure of collectivization. Khrushchev answered, ‘Enemies of the Soviet Union are trying to use our criticisms of shortcomings in the sphere of agriculture for their own ends, to put their own meaning into the criticism. Indeed, we sharply criticize our shortcomings in agriculture. However, this is not a kind of self-flagellation prompted by morbid repentance.’26 He emphasized that the Central Party did it to educate the workers, to train them and to eliminate problems more rapidly. He saw no contradiction between Stalin’s statement at the 18th Party Congress and Malenkov’s at 19th Party Congress claiming that the grain problem had been solved and the current push for agricultural reform. Both leaders were right, he told Sage, ‘when they said we have enough grain to assure bread for the population’. The task was to satisfy demand for best quality goods to the broad masses (which in capitalist countries, he pointed out, would lead to profiteering). ‘The Socialist way is to develop production and continue the policy of reducing prices’, he reminded his attentive visitor.