In 1929, a twenty-seven-year-old physicist named John Desmond Bernal published a short book called The World, the Flesh and the Devil. It was not widely read in 1929 and it has remained obscure for most of the intervening century, which is a shame, because it is one of the most remarkable documents of twentieth-century science-philosophy and contains, in outline, most of what people now call transhumanism. Bernal laid out a program of deliberate human self-modification in biological and technological directions that nobody else of his era was articulating with comparable clarity. He was working in Cambridge at the time, doing crystallography, not far from where Watson and Crick would eventually figure out DNA. He wrote the book in his spare time.
Bernal structured the book around three obstacles the human species would have to overcome to fulfill its potential. The first was the World — the physical universe and its constraints, which he thought the species would eventually have to transcend by leaving Earth and colonizing space. The second was the Flesh — the biological substrate of the human body, which he thought would eventually need to be modified or replaced to enable capacities the original body could not support. The third was the Devil — the psychological and cultural limitations inside the human mind, the fears and superstitions and reactive tendencies that would slow or stop the other two projects if they were not addressed. Each obstacle got its own chapter. Each chapter was a program for a specific domain of enhancement.
The chapter on the Flesh is the one that reads most astonishingly today. Bernal proposed, in 1929, that humans would eventually replace most of their biological substrate with mechanical substrate. He described what he called a brain in a jar — the idea that the essential work of a person could be sustained in a technological environment without the rest of the body, with appropriate life support and sensory inputs. He described distributed personhood, in which a single mind could operate across multiple physical substrates through some kind of communication link. He described the gradual replacement of organs with prosthetic equivalents, starting with the most fragile ones and working toward the most complex. He did not have the specific technologies. He had the conceptual framework, and he was working it out in detail decades before anyone else.
The framework was explicit about the direction. Bernal did not think biological humans were a final form. He thought they were a transitional form. The biological body was a good starting point for an intelligent species because it had been produced by evolution and had the minimum capacities required for cognition to develop. It was also limited in ways the species would eventually want to exceed. Fragility, finite lifespan, restricted sensory range, restricted metabolic flexibility, limited ability to operate outside a narrow environmental envelope — each of these was a constraint of the biological substrate. Bernal thought that a species aware of these constraints would, over sufficient time, develop the tools to transcend them. The transcendence would be gradual. Each step would be small. The cumulative effect, across centuries, would be a species that was not recognizably biological in the original sense.
The vocabulary he used was startling for its time. He wrote about mechanical men. He wrote about compound organisms consisting of multiple communicating minds. He wrote about the possibility of biological engineering that would modify the human germline for traits the species valued. He wrote about space colonies and the biology that would develop in space environments. He wrote about cognitive augmentation through direct technological interfaces. Every one of these topics has now been the subject of extensive serious research. In 1929, it was a young physicist writing in his spare time in Cambridge, outlining a program that nobody had yet begun to execute.
The chapter on the World — the space colonization chapter — contained the most detailed engineering speculation in the book. Bernal described what later came to be called a Bernal sphere, a large enclosed space habitat built to sustain human life independent of Earth. The engineering sketches he provided anticipated much of what became the standard science of space habitats in the 1970s. Gerard O'Neill's High Frontier, published in 1976, referenced Bernal explicitly. The space settlement designs that are still in circulation trace a direct line back to the 1929 book. Bernal was thinking about space colonization as a serious engineering program at a moment when the Wright brothers' first flight was only twenty-six years in the past.
The chapter on the Devil — the chapter on psychological and cultural obstacles — is the one that has aged most interestingly. Bernal was aware that the technical program he was describing would face resistance not primarily on technical grounds but on cultural ones. He wrote that the species would have to overcome its own attachment to its current form if it wanted to transcend the current form. The attachment would be dressed in various languages. Religious language about the sanctity of the body. Ethical language about playing God. Aesthetic language about the beauty of the natural form. Sentimental language about what the species has been for millennia. Each of these would serve to slow or prevent the program. Bernal thought the resistance was worth taking seriously but was ultimately a set of obstacles rather than reasons.
The book had a remarkably clear moral position, which is worth quoting in spirit if not in exact text. Bernal argued that the project of human self-transcendence was not in competition with human values. It was the fullest expression of human values. The species that made itself capable of more was not betraying its essence. It was fulfilling it. The project was continuous with everything that had made the human species distinct from its evolutionary neighbors — the use of tools, the development of language, the spread across the globe, the modification of environments to fit human needs. Each previous step had involved the species doing more than its ancestral biology was designed for. The biological modification steps were continuous with the tool-use steps. The difference was only that the modifications were being applied directly to the substrate rather than to the environment around it.
Now here is the part of the history that should make the current cultural conversation pause. Bernal was not writing in isolation. He was part of a small circle of British scientists and writers who were developing similar themes in the 1920s and 1930s. J.B.S. Haldane, whose 1924 essay Daedalus introduced the word ectogenesis for extracorporeal gestation, was a close associate. Haldane and Bernal were part of a broader intellectual current that included Julian Huxley, who would later coin the term transhumanism, and Aldous Huxley, whose novel Brave New World engaged with the same themes from a darker angle. The four of them — Haldane, Bernal, and the two Huxleys — represented a British scientific-literary tradition that was thinking systematically about deliberate human modification a full generation before anything like Silicon Valley existed. The ideas that circulate now as transhumanism are almost all derivable from documents they produced in the 1920s and 1930s.
Bernal himself was a complicated figure who has not been well-served by the standard intellectual histories. He was a committed Marxist, a fact that the English-speaking scientific establishment had trouble reconciling with his towering contributions to crystallography. He founded what became the field of X-ray crystallography of biological molecules, which is the field that produced the structural understanding of DNA, proteins, and viruses. He mentored Dorothy Hodgkin, who won the Nobel Prize for crystallographic work that grew directly out of his. His political commitments, which became unfashionable after World War II, got him partially written out of the scientific history that might otherwise have made him a household name. The speculative book from 1929 was treated as an eccentricity rather than as a landmark.
The eccentricity framing was wrong. Bernal was ahead of his century in a way that almost nobody else was. His framework for thinking about human self-modification was more detailed, more coherent, and more grounded in actual physics and biology than anything else from the era. The framework's descendants now drive multi-billion-dollar research programs. Altos Labs, working on cellular reprogramming, is continuing a project Bernal would have recognized immediately. SpaceX, working on space colonization, is continuing the engineering program Bernal outlined almost a century ago. Neuralink, working on brain-computer interfaces, is continuing the substrate-integration project Bernal described in his chapter on the Flesh. Each of these companies is executing pieces of a program that a twenty-seven-year-old physicist wrote down in 1929.
Let me tell you what is useful about this historical fact for the current conversation. Transhumanism gets attacked as a recent Silicon Valley ideology. The attack depends on the ideology being recent. If the ideology is actually a hundred years old, developed by leading scientists of the mid-twentieth century, rooted in the scientific tradition that produced modern biology and crystallography, the attack collapses. You cannot dismiss as a tech-bro fad a program that was articulated by the founder of structural biology in 1929, by the coiner of the term transhumanism in 1957, by the brother of Aldous Huxley who knew exactly what dystopias looked like and still endorsed the program. The intellectual lineage is too distinguished for the dismissive framing to hold.
The lineage is also useful for calibrating against the specific critiques. Bernal addressed the major objections to his program in 1929. The objection from religious essentialism — he addressed it. The objection from the sanctity of the natural — he addressed it. The objection from the risks of unintended consequences — he addressed it. The objection from class and access — he addressed it. The objections that circulate now in 2026 are largely the same objections he was already taking seriously in 1929, and his answers remain reasonable. Not every answer is correct. But the objections are not new. They have been in the conversation for a century, and the pro-enhancement side has been developing answers to them for a century. The conversation is older and more developed than most current commentators realize.
Let me tell you what I think the historical recovery of Bernal actually does. It changes the identity of the transhumanist project. In the current framing, transhumanism is the project of tech billionaires who want to live forever. That framing is unflattering and it makes the project easy to dismiss. In the historical framing, transhumanism is a British scientific-philosophical tradition that runs through Bernal, Haldane, the Huxleys, and forward through every generation of serious biologists and philosophers who have taken human self-modification seriously. The project belongs to the scientific mainstream of the last century. It belongs to the tradition that produced modern molecular biology, modern evolutionary theory, and the understanding of life that currently grounds biomedicine. The tech billionaires are latecomers. The ideas are older and more distinguished than the current funders.
This is important for anyone arguing for the project now. You are not arguing for a new ideology. You are defending a hundred-year-old scientific-philosophical tradition. You have company. The company includes some of the most respected biologists of the twentieth century. The arguments they developed are worth knowing. The objections they answered are worth remembering. The specific program Bernal outlined in 1929 — biological modification, cognitive augmentation, space colonization, and the project of overcoming the cultural and psychological resistance to these projects — is the program that remains active today. The program is advanced. The program is being executed. The program has a name, and the name is transhumanism, and the name was given to it sixty-plus years ago by Julian Huxley, who was in turn building on the work Bernal had done thirty years before him.
Step back and see what Bernal actually did. In 1929, a young Cambridge physicist sat down and wrote a book that described, in reasonable technical detail, the program of human self-transcendence that the species would begin executing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He was wrong about some of the details. He was right about almost all of the large patterns. He identified the obstacles correctly. He sketched the solutions in forms that were recognizable a century later. He did this in a few hundred pages, in his spare time, as a twenty-seven-year-old crystallographer. The fact that his work has been mostly forgotten is a specific failure of the scientific and cultural history of the twentieth century. The recovery of his work is the recovery of a piece of the intellectual history that the current conversation desperately needs. We are the species which modifies itself, and the specific articulation of what that modification would look like was written down, in outline, in 1929, by someone who is not even a name most people know.