Written by the pioneering scientist, theorist and activist J. D. Bernal, this futuristic essay explores the radical changes to human bodies and intelligence that science may bring about, and suggests the impact of these developments on society. Bernal presents a far-reaching vision of the future that encompasses space research and colonization, material sciences, genetic engineering, and the technological hive mind. In his view, it will be possible for the conditions of civilization to reach a state of materialist utopia. For all three realms—the world, the flesh, and the devil—Bernal attempted to map out the utmost limit of technoscientific progress, and found that there are almost no limits. With a new introduction by McKenzie Wark.

J.D. Bernal, widely known as Sage since his undergraduate days at Cambridge, was a visionary scientist who was the first to see that the new subject of X-ray crystallography could be applied to the study of life. His pioneering work at Cambridge in the 1930s laid the foundation of molecular biology. He was one of the most influential and brilliant scientists of his time, inspiring many subsequent Nobel laureates. Bernal's restless energy and legendary intellect took him far beyond science. An astonishing polymath and a fervent Marxist, he was one of the central figures in a cosmopolitan intelligentsia in an age of extremes. The story of Bernal's life reflects the extraordinary political and intellectual climate in which he lived. He was witness to (and often involved in) some of the great events of the 20th century: the Easter Rebellion, schooldays in the Great War, the anti-fascist movement, the Second World War, pacifist causes and nuclear disarmament during the Cold War. He was a pioneer of Operational Research during WW2 and made the first objective analyses of the effects of bombing on cities. As this biography shows, he played a crucial role in planning the D-Day landings, arriving secretly on the Normandy beaches himself a day later. After the war, he became an international ambassador for Marxism, science, and peace, and was one of the few men familiar with Downing Street, the White House and the Kremlin. Brown's biography sets out a life richly and fully lived. Nearly every important British scientist of the mid-third of the 20th century appears in its pages, along with artists (Picasso, Hepworth), writers (Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Pablo Neruda) and statesmen (Churchill, Khrushchev, Mao, and Nehru). This compelling account draws on unprecedented access to Bernal's papers and war reports to piece together a dazzling image of Bernal: his Irish Catholic childhood, his Cambridge years, his research, his dedication to science, his intellectual brilliance, his blind, unswerving commitment to Marxism, his unorthodox Bohemian love life. But above all, the Bernal who emerges from this often critical account is a man not only of remarkable mental powers but of great warmth, kindness, and humanity.

J. D. Bernal's important and ambitious work, The Social Function of Science, was first published in January 1939. As the subtitle -What Science Does, What Science Could Do - suggests it is in two parts. Both have eight chapters. Part 1: What Science Does: Introductory, Historical, The Existing Organization of Scientific Research in Britain, Science in Education, The Efficiency of Scientific Research, The Application of Science, Science and War and International Science. Part 11: What Science Could Do: The Training of the Scientist, The Reorganization of Research, Scientific Communication, The Finance of Science, The Strategy of Scientific Advance; Science in the Service of Man, Science and Social Transformation and The Social Function of Science. To quote Bernal's biographer, Andrew Brown, 'The Social Function of Science . . . was Bernal's attempt to ensure that science would no longer be just a protected area of intellectual inquiry, but would have as an inherent function the improvement of life for mankind everywhere. It was a groundbreaking treatise both in exploring the scope of science and technology in fashioning public policy, with Bernal arguing that science is the chief agent of change in society, and in devising policies that would optimize the way science was organized. The sense of impending war clearly emerges. Bernal deplored the application of scientific discoveries in making war ever more destructive, while acknowledging that the majority of scientific and technical breakthroughs have their origins in military exigencies, both because of the willingness to spend money and the premium placed on novelty during wartime.' Anticipating by two decades the schism C. P. Snow termed 'The Two Cultures', Bernal remarked that 'highly developed science stands almost isolated from a traditional literary culture.' He found that wrong. Again, quoting Andrew Brown, 'to him, science was a creative endeavour that still depended on inspiration and talent, just as much as in painting, writing or composing.' The importance of this book was such that twenty-five years after its publication, a collection of essays, The Science of Science, was published, in part in celebration, but also to explore many of the themes Bernal had first developed.

An eminent molecular physicist and path-breaking crystallographer, an eloquent and prescient writer on the social implications of science, an early foe of pseudo-scientific racism and an indefatigable campaigner for peace and civil rights: as a scientist and a Communist intellectual, J.D. Bernal was caught up in many of the dramas of the twentieth century. As Eric Hobsbawm describes here, Bernal played a major role in the dynamic 'red science' movement of the 1930s, whose ideas on links between science and society are only now being accorded their full significance. Bernal's The Social Function of Science remains a classic analysis of the way in which wider social relations may determine the boundaries of both scientific understanding and practice. Impressed by Bernal's relentless questioning of received ideas, Mountbatten recruited him to the brilliant scientific team of his 'Department of Wild Talents' during World War Two, to help in planning the Normandy landings. After the war, Bernal strove to combine running the Department of Physics at Birkbeck College, London, with travelling and campaigning through six continents against the nuclear threat of the Cold War. In a field notorious for its mysoginism, Bernal's laboratories at Birkbeck were a haven for many of the leading women scientists of the day, among them Rosalind Franklin and the Nobel Laureate Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin. And, as James Watson has acknowledged, Bernal's X-ray photographs of molecular structures formed a vital piece of evidence on the path leading to the discovery of DNA. In this wide-ranging collection of essays, different facets of Bernal's life and work are recounted and assessed by Eric Hobsbawm, Hilary and Steven Rose, Ivor Montagu, Ritchie Calder, Francis Aprahamian, Brenda Swann, Roy Johnston, Chris Freeman and Peter Mason