A Cambridge biochemist learned Chinese and rewrote the history of invention
Joseph Needham was an established Cambridge biochemist when three Chinese students arrived in 1937. One of them, Lu Gwei-djen, taught him Chinese, and the result was Science and Civilisation in China, a project cataloguing inventions from gunpowder to the magnetic compass once credited to the West. It has now reached 27 volumes.
Born on 9 December 1900 to a Harley Street doctor and a composer, he was drawn to rational theology by the mathematician-preacher Ernest Barnes and to engineering and cooperation by Oundle School's headmaster Frederick William Sanderson, whom he called a man of genius. At Cambridge he switched from medicine to biochemistry under Frederick Hopkins, earning a PhD in October 1925. His three-volume Chemical Embryology of 1931 included a history of the field from ancient Egypt onward, reflecting his worry that narrow specialism slowed science.
Lu, daughter of a Nanjing pharmacist, sparked the passion; he then mastered Classical Chinese privately with Gustav Haloun. From 1942 to 1946 he ran the Sino-British Science Co-operation Office in Chongqing, travelling across war-torn China to supply laboratories. One journey reached the Dunhuang caves, where a Diamond Sutra, the oldest printed book bearing a date, had been discovered; another got back across the Xiang River two days before the bridge at Hengyang was blown up. Everywhere he gathered old books, later joined by 2,000 volumes of the Gujin Tushu Jicheng encyclopaedia sent by the meteorologist Zhu Kezhen.
Back in Europe, he became the first head of UNESCO's natural sciences section, having insisted that science belong in its mandate, and argued that help should go chiefly to periphery nations outside the European-American bright zone. He resigned in 1948 amid American suspicion of working with communists. That year he pitched his China book to Cambridge University Press; within weeks it had swollen to seven planned volumes, and the first appeared in 1954. He wrote fifteen himself.
The work raised what became the Needham Question: why China, once ahead, surrendered scientific leadership to the West. He was Master of Gonville and Caius from 1965 until he was 76, and in 1992 he received the Companion of Honour, leaving him the only living person who also held fellowships of the Royal Society and the British Academy. He died on 24 March 1995, and the Needham Research Institute carries the series on.
Source: Joseph Needham
