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( John Desmond Bernal)
John Desmond Bernal FRS (10 May 1901—15 September 1971) was an Irish-born scientist known for pioneering X-ray crystallography. He was born in Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland. He was educated at Bedford School near London, and then at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University. At Cambridge he studied both mathematics and science for a B. A. degree in 1922, which he followed by another year of natural sciences. He taught himself the theory of space groups, including the quaternion method; this became the mathematical basis of later work on crystal structure. After graduating he started research under Sir William Bragg at the Davy-Faraday Laboratory in London. In 1924 he determined the structure of graphite. It was in his research group in Cambridge that Dorothy Hodgkin started her research. Together, in 1934, they took the first X-ray photographs of hydrated protein crystals. Other prominent scientists who studied with him include Rosalind Franklin, Aaron Klug and Max Perutz. He was later Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London (where he became Master) and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
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