At the age of two, John Desmond Bernal was taken by his American mother from their farm in Ireland to see his grandmother in California. He amazed other passengers on the steamship by talking in both English and French. Later on, when he was at Cambridge, his fellow undergraduates would nickname him “Sage” because of his seemingly limitless knowledge.

J D Bernal: A Life in Science and Politics is a collection of essays about the crowded life of this famous crystallographer, Marxist and political activist. Most of the essays are by authors who knew Bernal, who lived from 1901 to 1971, but few of them can approach the drama and descriptive power of Bernal’s own essay entitled “D-day diaries”, which is one of the book’s highlights. Indeed, some chapters contain turgid sociological analyses; in “Irish roots”, for example, Bernal’s free-spirited parents are burdened with complexes about class and religion that they were unlikely to have experienced in reality.

There are also some remarkably sympathetic accounts of Bernal’s totalitarian beliefs. This partiality even extends to the “Notes on contributors”, where we are informed that Ivor Montagu, who worked with Bernal for the World Peace Council, was for many years “president of the English Table Tennis Association” – but not that he was president of the British Communist Party.

Bernal’s seminal contributions to X-ray crystallography are lucidly recounted and set in context by Peter Trent. As an undergraduate at Cambridge, Bernal studied mineralogy and mathematical concepts of symmetry, which culminated in a thesis entitled “On the Analytical Theory of Point Systems”. This gained him a research post in 1923 at the Royal Institution in London with William Henry Bragg, who set him to work on the structure of graphite. Bernal dissected out a single crystal, mounted it at the centre of an alarm-clock, and took X-ray photographs as the crystal rotated. According to reciprocal-lattice theory, each plane in a crystal is represented by a point, and can therefore be directly correlated with one X-ray diffraction spot. Bernal used these ideas to develop a chart from which two co-ordinates could be read for each diffraction spot, thereby allowing a stereographic projection of the plane to be made.

In 1927 he returned to Cambridge as the first lecturer in structural crystallography, and clearly saw the enormous potential of his chosen field, namely that X-ray diffraction patterns could be used “to fix the nature and orientation of the minute crystals which go to build up common substances”. This, Bernal realized, would provide a way of analysing “all the textures of natural and artificial products. This is the type of information which links crystallography to biology on the one hand and technology on the other.”

Bernal’s achievement was to realize this ambitious agenda by his own brilliant work and also by inspiring the next generation of crystallographers at the Cavendish Laboratory and at Birkbeck College in London, where he was appointed professor of physics in 1937. Between them, these two groups of researchers did much to establish the three-dimensional structures of nucleic acids, proteins and viruses. Indeed, the field of molecular biology was sterile until Bernal’s simple observation that protein crystals could be studied only in the wet state. Prominent students of his were Rosalind Franklin, Dorothy Hodgkin, Aaron Klug and Max Perutz.

Bernal’s odyssey from uncommitted Irish nationalist, through undergraduate socialist to unswerving Marxist is minutely catalogued. He became a passionate proponent of state planning, particularly in the integration of scientific research and industrial technology, with a subjugation of individual liberty that he especially would have found intolerable. Indeed, his work was inextricably linked to his revolutionary ideas. One of the attractions of biology was that it was the academic discipline of J B S Haldane, Joseph Needham and Lancelot Hogben, who together with Bernal constituted the intellectual hardcore of British Marxism.

The purges in the Soviet Union of the 1930s no doubt caused these British Marxists moments of private anguish, but the rise of Trofim Lysenko as Stalin’s favourite biologist should have presented them with an unavoidable challenge. Lysenko promised a quick fix for the woeful state of Soviet agriculture and began a crusade against the conventional theory of genetics. However, the ambivalent reaction of Haldane and Bernal to Lysenko’s actions was craven. It was left to Sergei Vavilov – the leading Soviet geneticist whom Lysenko denounced to Stalin – to defend the science of genetics, saying: “We shall go to the pyre, we shall burn, but we shall not retreat from our convictions.”

Vavilov was not exaggerating – he was arrested in 1941 and refused to admit to false accusations, despite being tortured. For Hilary Rose and Steven Rose to therefore write, as they do here, that Vavilov died “in transit to a labour camp” is equivalent to stating that Joan of Arc died in a fire. Even the Roses feel compelled to issue a mild rebuke for Bernal’s obituary of Stalin as “a great scientist [who combined] a deeply scientific approach to all problems with his capacity for feeling and expressing himself in simple and direct terms”.

Like so many Marxists, Bernal had an outstanding war against the Nazis, but he did not have to wait for the Hitler-Stalin pact to be revoked. Despite his presidency of the Cambridge Scientists’ Anti-War Group and his known communism, Bernal was recruited in 1939 as a free-ranging consultant by Sir John Anderson, then minister in charge of civilian defence. (Bernal had been invited to a lunch with Anderson as his most outspoken critic, and Anderson had immediately recognized the quality of Bernal’s intellect.) When questioned about the suitability of his choice, Anderson replied: “Even if he is as red as the flames of hell, I want him.”

Bernal’s initial aim was to establish objective data about explosions, a subject that was until then largely based on assumptions. He worked closely with the physiologist Solly Zuckerman, and together they tested their theories about blast injury by exposing themselves to explosions in slit trenches. Indeed, a similar experiment later in the war nearly ended in disaster for John Kendrew (who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his elucidation of the structure of myoglobin) after Bernal misplaced a decimal point on his slide rule.

Bernal and Zuckerman were also responsible for the first detailed survey of the effects of bombing on a civilian population. Their findings that people did not become demoralized and that industrial production did not suffer from such bombings were, however, misrepresented by Churchill’s friend and scientific adviser, Frederick Lindemann, as justification for the bombing of German cities. One memorable vignette supplied in the book is from Lord Ritchie Calder. He recounts that Bernal’s own successful pitch to Churchill that the Allied forces should land during D-day at Mulberry harbours on the Normandy beaches was accomplished in front of the prime minister by floating paper boats in a bathtub on the Queen Mary.

All in all, this book makes a persuasive case for Bernal, the original and inspirational scientist; his sagacity as a philosopher of science and political figure remains questionable.