Science Quote by John Desmond Bernal

Bernal is sketching a political horror story in lab clothes: the moment research stops being a public good with public accountability and starts behaving like a sovereign power. The phrase "scientific corporations" is doing double work. It names an institutional shift (science migrating from universities and civic missions into industrial, security, and proprietary regimes) and it hints at a new ruling class - technical, insulated, and self-justifying. When he says these entities could become "almost independent states", he is not being poetic; he is warning that control over knowledge, infrastructure, and experimentation can function like territory, law, and military capacity.

The sharpest edge is in the second clause: the outside world becomes "less and less able to judge". Bernal isn't merely worried about secrecy; he's worried about incomprehensibility. As expertise concentrates, democratic oversight doesn't just get blocked - it gets outpaced. The public can't consent to what it can't understand, and regulators can't govern what they can't even describe.

Context matters. Bernal lived through the industrialization of science, the rise of state-funded mega-projects, and the atomic age, when a small cadre of specialists could reshape geopolitics. His Marxist-inflected suspicion of capitalist institutions sits just under the surface: corporations don't merely innovate; they set agendas, define acceptable risk, and externalize consequences. The intent is preventative. He's calling for science to remain legible to society, because once experimentation becomes a sovereign privilege, the rest of us are reduced to spectators of decisions that still land on our lives.