How Much Does the Scientific Ecosystem Change over Time?

Desmond Bernal was an outstanding crystallographer. Not himself a Nobel Prize winner, he set the likes of Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz on their own successful paths to that accolade. A Communist, he fell from grace during the 50’s and 60’s due to his unwavering commitment to the Russian regime and the (discredited) theories of the geneticist Trofim Lysenko. However, before and during the second world war he was one of the giants of British science, heavily involved with providing scientific advice to government during the war and appreciated as a polymath with a grasp of many subjects beyond his own field, and beyond science itself. He easily slipped from the analysis of X-ray patterns before the war into modelling bomb blasts and the statistics of the way they damaged life and property during the Blitz.

I have been rereading his biography (J.D.Bernal The Sage of Science by Andrew Brown) and that has pointed me to his massive and influential 1939 work The Social Function of Science. Inevitably, parts of this will have dated very badly, but there are an uncanny number of comments about the state of science in society then which still ring horribly true. People often talk about how the satirical 1908 description of Cambridge life from Francis Cornford (Microcosmographia: Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician) echoes across the years, with its downbeat assessment of how business is done – or not – within the University and how to be influential, for instance. I think this ringing true equally applies to much of Bernal’s text, only now applicable across the country’s research ecosystem. It, however, was not at all satirical but deadly serious, intended as a call to action for society.

Most people practicing science in our universities would sympathise with the statement ‘Nor are the actual emoluments of the young research worker really adequate’ for instance. The 1930’s may not have had to endure the REF, but the publish or perish culture was clearly alive and well:

One more peculiarly damaging to science is the necessity incumbent upon all research workers to produce results and to see that they are published.…for it is on his published results by number and bulk as much as by excellence that his future depends…Another result is to burden scientific literature with masses of useless papers.

One should remember back then papers were not online. Wading through the Science Citation Index – a very substantial collection of tomes which was the necessary route for me and generations before (and after) to try to track down who had cited which paper/ whose papers had been cited – was hard work in a library, not something one could skim through at one’s desk, and useless papers just take up unnecessary space. Such papers are probably even more prevalent now, with predatory journals cluttering up reading matter with papers of dubious quality. How does one separate the wheat from the chaff as a young researcher, especially if you obey the DORA mantra and don’t look at citation indices?

Bernal was a friend of CP Snow’s, whose PhD thesis on The Structure of Single Molecules at one point passed through my hands when the Cambridge Colloid Group and its library were disbanded. Indeed Bernal ‘appeared’ as Constantine, a brilliant polymath scientist in Snow’s first novel The Search. It is therefore interesting to wonder what his influence was on Snow’s fury about the two cultures, exposed in the 1959 Rede Lecture of that name in Cambridge. Bernal writes, twenty years before, that ‘Among people of literary culture there is almost an affectation of knowing nothing about science.’ The worry is that may still persist, although my concern would be not that this impacts on literary culture so much as those who studied literature may then go on to control policy decisions involving science. Bernal worried about that too:

The lack of proper appreciation of science is not confined to the public at large; it is particularly powerful and dangerous in the fields of administration and politics.

It is not for nothing that Angela Maclean, as GCSA, has aspirations (seemingly met) of getting 50% of the civil servants entering through the Fast Stream route to come from a scientific discipline.

However, clearly Bernal has encountered some who have access to policy decisions when he makes the statement

Somebody who knows the Prime Minister suggests that something might be done for a particular branch of research, and in that typically English way scientific research carries on.

Whether it is somebody knowing the Prime Minister personally or some other Cabinet member, as they come and go, there may still be too much truth in that about what areas of research get moved up the funding agenda.

My motivation in turning to The Social Function of Science was to consider Bernal’s views on education. In the Brown biography these are given as (taken from another 1939 publication Science Teaching in General Education)

1. To provide enough understanding of the place of science in society to enable the great majority that will not be actively engaged in scientific pursuits to collaborate intelligently with those who are, and to be able to cricise or appreciate the effect of science on society.
2. To give a practical understanding of scientific method, sufficient to be applicable to the problems which the citizen has to face in his individual and social life.

Those aspirations seem valid today as much as 80+ years ago. However, Bernal obviously felt back then that what actually happens in schools falls far short of this, and the words he wrote may currently be of relevance to the ongoing Curriculum and Assessment Review. Bernal writes somewhat sardonically

Actually for the convenience of teachers and the requirements of the examination system, it is necessary that the pupils not only do not learn scientific method but learn precisely the reverse, that is, to believe on the authority of their masters or text-books exactly what they are told and to reproduce it when asked, whether it seems nonsense to them or not…the only way of learning the method of science is the long and bitter way of personal experience….It is unfortunate that the easiest modes of testing knowledge and those which on the average will give the fairest results are precisely those that are the least valuable from the point of view of acquisition of scientific knowledge.

The phrase ‘teach to the test’ was clearly as appropriate then as now. Bernal, as an FRS, was no doubt very aware of the Royal Society’s motto ‘Nullius in Verba’, clearly at odds with the sentiment in that first sentence above.

Finally (in as far as I’ve just picked out a few sentences from the entire book) what about the stereotypes that schoolchildren may get exposed to? This is a topic on which I have previously said much, because I believe it is discouraging for many children when they cannot see examples of people like them. Bernal had thought about this ; his description here is also probably tending to the satirical when he writes

This does not usually take the form so often imagined, of the scientist as an other-worldly person who can only just manage to keep alive through the assistance of female relations.

I don’t believe that was a sexist comment in the modern meaning of the word. Bernal supported many female researchers, including Hodgkin as I’ve already mentioned. He was merely reflecting the inevitable norm of the day, of the male scientist with a stay-at-home wife (a domestic scene somewhat at odds with his own chaotic life, where he had many lovers including Hodgkin, and children by two of them. One of those I was at school with, perhaps reflected in my own interest in the man.)

Bernal is no longer revered in the way he was. He turned up in my undergraduate lectures as the man who tried to unravel the structure of liquids using plasticine spheres in a sack, to come up with the model of random close packing. I taught that too, when I lectured on Materials to undergraduate physicists. But his work on crystallography is so fundamental it is probably now invisible to many. As the biography – and his own writings – show, he was a man of many interesting parts.