Who was the head of the Physics Department at Birkbeck College when Rosalind Franklin worked there?

John Desmond Bernal was head of the Physics Department at Birkbeck College when Rosalind Franklin worked there. Franklin joined Birkbeck in 1953 after leaving King’s College London, and Bernal recruited her to lead research in his biomolecular laboratory.

Bernal was a prominent physicist and X-ray crystallographer who had become Professor of Physics at Birkbeck in 1937. He was known for supporting women scientists, and his laboratory also became associated with researchers such as Aaron Klug and Dorothy Hodgkin. Franklin’s work at Birkbeck shifted toward viruses, including tobacco mosaic virus and, later, poliovirus.

A common mix-up is to confuse Bernal with John Randall, who directed the laboratory at King’s College London where Franklin conducted her famous DNA diffraction work. Bernal was the senior figure at Birkbeck; Randall was her supervisor at King’s. Franklin’s move to Birkbeck had been planned before the Nature papers on DNA appeared in April 1953.