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This crisis-ridden period also saw the production in 1939 of Bernal's germinal text, The Social Function of Science. This book, together with his towering intellectual presence within the British Communist Party, gave British Marxism a peculiarly natural scientific slant. 19 Francis Bacon, that seventeenth-century founding father of modern science, with his highly empiricist theory of natural philosophy, was recruited by Bernal into his Marxist analysis of science. Bacon's belief that science could be produced by "any man" 20 who followed the test of empirical practice found echo in the experimental scientist. For Bernal, the democracy of science and the democracy of Communism reinforced one another; 21 at its best, science was Communism. The Social Function of Science immediately made Bernal the founding figure in the now huge field of science, technology and society studies. Even today, one of the most prestigious awards of the US Society for the Social Studies of Science is an annual Bernal prize; that all too many of its recipients have been the narrow professionals of whom his life as a public intellectual stands in contempt is just one of life's ironies. 22
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