Archive for August 2011

‘If you can’t beat them, empathize with them – then crush them.’ Behold the new operational motto of the beleaguered Pentagon as it strains to humor George W. Bush’s endless, limitless, clueless ‘war on terror.’ All the military needs is a few good PhDs. The Pentagon customarily has called upon white lab-coated scientists to conjure…

John Desmond (“J.D.”) Bernal was one of the great scientists of the 20th century, pioneering the use of X-rays to solve the structure of proteins. His intellectual power embraced not only a wide range of the sciences – physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics – but also the history of science, the social function of science,…