"We shall be forced to attempt planned and directed research employing hundreds of workers for many years, and this cannot be done without risking the loss of independence and originality. This is a serious and fundamental obstacle but it may be overcome in two ways"
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Bernal is staring straight at the price tag of modern science, and he’s not pretending it’s just a bookkeeping problem. “Planned and directed research employing hundreds of workers for many years” reads like an early diagnosis of Big Science: the Manhattan Project model, the postwar laboratory-industrial complex, the shift from the lone investigator to the managed research pipeline. He’s describing scale as a kind of gravity. Once you need hundreds of salaries, specialized instruments, and years of runway, you also need patrons, committees, and priorities that aren’t purely intellectual.
The bracing move is that Bernal doesn’t romanticize independence as an untouchable virtue. He calls the risk plainly: planning can sand down originality, and bureaucracy can turn curiosity into compliance. The subtext is political as much as administrative. Who does the directing? The state? Industry? Military funders? Bernal, a scientist with strong Marxist commitments, is implicitly arguing that scientific freedom can’t be treated as a private possession of brilliant individuals; it’s an institutional arrangement that has to be engineered, protected, and justified in public terms.
His “two ways” tease is tactical rhetoric. He concedes the obstacle to win credibility, then pivots to solutions, signaling that the dilemma isn’t fatalism but design. The line’s real intent is to move the reader from nostalgia for heroic individual science toward a harder question: if large-scale research is inevitable, what structures preserve dissent, serendipity, and genuine originality inside the machine?
The bracing move is that Bernal doesn’t romanticize independence as an untouchable virtue. He calls the risk plainly: planning can sand down originality, and bureaucracy can turn curiosity into compliance. The subtext is political as much as administrative. Who does the directing? The state? Industry? Military funders? Bernal, a scientist with strong Marxist commitments, is implicitly arguing that scientific freedom can’t be treated as a private possession of brilliant individuals; it’s an institutional arrangement that has to be engineered, protected, and justified in public terms.
His “two ways” tease is tactical rhetoric. He concedes the obstacle to win credibility, then pivots to solutions, signaling that the dilemma isn’t fatalism but design. The line’s real intent is to move the reader from nostalgia for heroic individual science toward a harder question: if large-scale research is inevitable, what structures preserve dissent, serendipity, and genuine originality inside the machine?
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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