He is best known for developing a humanistic approach to science, and as the presenter and writer of the thirteen-part 1973 BBC television documentary series, and accompanying book, The Ascent of Man.

From 1963 he was a resident fellow of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, until his death in 1974 in East Hampton, New York, just a year after the airing of his Ascent of Man.

Although, according to Bronowski, he knew only two English words on arriving in Britain,[3] he gained admission to the Central Foundation Boys' School in London and went on to study mathematics at the University of Cambridge, graduating as Senior Wrangler (best student mathematician) in 1930.

Beginning in this period, the British secret service MI5 placed him under surveillance, believing he was a security risk,[6] which may have restricted his access to senior posts in the UK.

During the Second World War, Bronowski worked in operations research for the UK's Ministry of Home Security, where he developed mathematical approaches to bombing strategy for RAF Bomber Command.

Bronowski, in conjunction with Professor W. N. Thomas of Cardiff University,[7] subsequently produced the secret Report of the British Mission to Japan: the Effects of the Atomic Bombs Dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,[8] which was passed to various government departments and consulted in the design of future UK public buildings.

Following his experiences of the after-effects of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings, he discontinued his work for British military research and turned to biology, as did his friend Leo Szilard, and many other physicists of that time, to better understand the nature of violence.

In 1967 Bronowski delivered the six Silliman Memorial Lectures at Yale University and chose as his subject the role of imagination and symbolic language in the progress of scientific knowledge.

[10] The documentary was described as "a landmark in television" and "lavishly produced and visually stunning, it impressed viewers with its lucidity and with the power of the presenter’s personality".

Bronowski died in 1974 of a heart attack in East Hampton, New York,[17] a year after The Ascent of Man was first televised, and his ashes were buried in the western side of London's Highgate Cemetery, near the entrance.

[19] In 2013, Cambridge University Press published a critique, Jacob Bronowski: a humanist intellectual for an atomic age, 1946–1956, by the science historian Ralph Desmarais,[20] who wrote: "Witnessing Hiroshima helped transform him from pure mathematician–poet to scientific administrator ... to fame on the BBC airwaves ... from literary intellectual who promoted the superior truthfulness of poetry and poets to scientific humanist insisting that science and scientists were the standard-bearers of truth", but "discussing atomic energy ... Bronowski not only downplayed the bomb's significance but was deliberately vague regarding Britain's atomic weapon development programme."

[11] Sandefur's biography was reviewed in Nature by David Edgerton, who writes of Bronowski's BBC documentary: "Lavishly produced and visually stunning, it impressed viewers with its lucidity and with the power of the presenter’s personality.

"[11] In October 2023, an article in Varsity magazine wrote of Bronowski's TV documentary: "His passion guided his eloquence as if hoping to make the viewer just as interested as he was.