The young radical scientist Desmond Bernal wrote that he lived in an age of “tottering civilizations. Seeing waste and ignorance, deliberate wrong from minds twisted by old ideas and ill adjusted lives…[But] I do know that I am happy to be born in my own time (b.1901), a time of stress, but a time of hope and of new born knowledge”

Biographical fragment “Microcosm” (about 1926)