Desmond Bernal and his Role in the Biological Exploitation of X-Ray Crystallography

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Hodgkin DMC . John Desmond Bernai (1901–1971). Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 1980;26: 17–84.

Kendrew JC . Bemal, (John) Desmond (1901–1971). Dictionary of National Biography. 1971–1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986: 53–4.

Thomas JM . Architecture of the invisible. Nature 1993; 364: 478–82.

Watson JD . The Double Helix. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968. Reprinted by Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1970:120–34. Chapter 23 recounts how Watson made away with the details in the X-ray photographs under conditions essentially involving a breach of trust, and committed them to paper as soon as he parted from Wilkins. The patterns given by wet crystals were unbelievably simpler than those in prints of the dry form (and indicated a double rather than a triple chain). In giving his personal account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, Watson made some amends by including an X-ray photograph of DNA taken by Rosalind Franklin in 1952 (Figure 13, to illustrate its simplicity compared with the complicated Figure 9).

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Hodgkin DMC . History and non-history. Nature 1981; 289: 99–100. A review of Goldsmith's Sage (reference 6) which includes a refutation of the author's contentious analysis of Bernal's review of Watson's The Double Helix (reference 5), in which Bernai admitted “My name does not appear, and rightly, in the double helix story”, a disavowal quoted but ignored by Goldsmith.

Zuckerman S . From Apes to Warlords. The Autobiography of Solly Zuckerman (1904–1946). London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978.

Bernal JD . The World, the Flesh and the Devil. London: Cape, 1929. “The Flesh” was reprinted in Health and Disease, a Reader, edited by Blake N Boswell D Gray A Milton Keynes: The Open University, 1984:305–9.