| | Letter from Francis Crick to John Desmond Bernal (January 20, 1969) |
 | | In this letter Crick pays tribute to the crystallographer and political activist J. Desmond Bernal, called Sage by his friends because of his reputation as a polymath. |
 | | In the early 1930s Bernal had pioneered the use of X-ray diffraction techniques in elucidating the structure of biologically significant macromolecules such as proteins, at the time an undertaking of almost insurmountable complexity. |
 | | The crystallographers and Nobel Laureates Max Perutz and Dorothy Hodgkin, mentioned by Crick, studied with Bernal at Cambridge University in the 1930s and were his most famous disciples. |
| profiles.nlm.nih.gov /SC/B/B/N/R (322 words) |