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Joseph Needham

Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, CH, FRS, FBA (December 9, 1900–March 24 1995) was a British biochemist best known for his works on the history of Chinese science. He was elected a fellow of both the Royal Society and the British Academy. In China, he is known mainly by his Chinese name Li Yuese (李約瑟; Pinyin: Lǐ Yuēsè: Wade-Giles: Li Yüeh-Sê).

Biography

Early life

Needham was the only child of a Scottish family in London: his father was a doctor and his mother, Alicia Adelaïde Needham née Montgomery (1863–1945), was a composer and music teacher. Needham was educated at Cambridge University, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1921, master's degree in January 1925 and doctorate in October 1925. After graduation, he worked in F.G. Hopkins's laboratory at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, specialising in embryology and morphogenesis.

Career

Three Chinese scientists came to work with Needham in 1936: Lu Gwei-djen, Wang Ying-lai (王應睞), and Chen Shi-chang (沈詩章). Lu (1904–91), daughter of a Nanjingese pharmacist, taught Needham Classical Chinese. This ignited Needham's interest in China's technological and scientific past.

Under the Royal Society's direction, Needham was the director of the Sino-British Science Co-operation Office in Chongqing from 1942 to 1946. Needham collaborated with the historian Wang Ling (王玲), who solidified Needham's passion for Chinese scientific history.

Needham wrote his first book on the history of Chinese technology in 1945, titled Chinese Science. He also met numerous Chinese scholars, including the painter Wu Zuoren (吳作人), and travelled to sites in western China, including Dunhuang and Yunnan. He also visited educational institutions, from which large amounts of references and materials were collected, which would aid his editing of Science and Civilisation in China Series.

After two years' tenure as the first head of the Natural Science division at UNESCO in Paris, France — indeed, it was Needham who insisted that Science should be included in the organisation's mandate — he returned to Gonville and Caius College in 1948, when Cambridge University Press partially funded his Science and Civilisation in China series. He devoted much energy to the history of Chinese science until his retirement in 1990, even though he continued to teach biochemistry until 1966. He also supported the controversial Chinese communist claims of American biological warfare as an inspector from 1952 to 1953 in North Korea during the Korean War. Needham's biographer Simon Winchester comments on this incident and Needham's general infatuation with communism: "Needham was intellectually in love with communism; and yet communist spymasters and agents, it turned out, had pitilessly duped him." (The Man Who Loved China, p. 212).

In 1965, with Derek Bryan, a retired diplomat, Needham established the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, which for some years provided the only way for the British to visit the People's Republic of China.

Later life

Needham was first married to Dorothy (née Moyle, 1896–1987). In 1989, two years after Dorothy's death, Needham married Lu Gwei-djen. He suffered from Parkinson's disease from 1982, and died at the age of 94 at his Cambridge home. In 2008 the Chair of Chinese in the University of Cambridge was endowed in honour of Joseph Needham.

Honours

In 1961, Needham was awarded the Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society and in 1966 he became Master of Gonville and Caius College. In 1984, Needham became the fourth recipient of the J.D. Bernal Award, awarded by the Society for Social Studies of Science. In 1990, he was awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize by Fukuoka City.

The Needham Research Institute, devoted to the study of China's scientific history, was opened in 1985 by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

Science and Civilisation in China

In 1954, Needham with an international team of collaborators, started a project to study the science and civilisation of ancient China. This project produced a series of volumes titled Science and Civilisation in China published under the Cambridge University Press. The project is now proceeding under the guidance of the Publications Board of the Needham Research Institute, chaired by Christopher Cullen.

Needham's Grand Question

"Needham's Grand Question" is why China had been overtaken by the West in science and technology, despite its earlier successes. His works attribute significant weight to the impact of Confucianism and Taoism on the pace of Chinese scientific discovery, and emphasizes what it describes as the 'diffusionist' approach of Chinese science as opposed to a perceived independent inventiveness in the western world.

Criticism

Needham's work has been criticized by some scholars for its strong inclination to exaggerate Chinese technological achievements and its propensity to prove a Chinese origin for the wide range of objects his work covered.

From an early age, Needham's political views were unorthodox and his lifestyle controversial. His work in science was based in an idiosyncratic form of Christian socialism and after 1949 his sympathy with Chinese culture was extended to the new government. Needham supported the controversial Chinese communist claims that the Americans had used biological warfare in the Korean War. Needham's biographer Simon Winchester comments that "Needham was intellectually in love with communism; and yet communist spymasters and agents, it turned out, had pitilessly duped him" Winchester also notes that because of his assertions Needham was blacklisted by the U.S. government until well into the 1970s.

Bibliography

Works by Joseph Needham

Science, Religion and Reality (1925)
Chemical Embryology (1931)
The Great Amphibium; four lectures on the position of religion in a world dominated by science (1931)
Perspectives in Biochemistry; thirty-one essays presented to Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins by past and present members of his laboratory (1937)
History Is On Our Side (1947)
Science Outpost; papers of the Sino-British science co-operation office (British council scientific office in China) 1942-1946 (1948)
Science and Civilisation in China (1954)
Science and Civilization in China, by Joseph Needham, with the research assistance [and collaboration] of Wang Ling (1954-59) 2 Volumes
A History of Embryology (1959)
The Grand Titration: science and society in East and West (1969)
Within the Four Seas: the dialogue of east and west (1969)
Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West: lectures and addresses on the history of science and technology (1970)
Chinese Science; explorations of an ancient tradition (1973)
Moulds of Understanding: a pattern of natural philosophy (1976)
The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China, volume 1: an abridgement of Joseph Needham's original text (1978)
The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China, volume 2: an abridgement of Joseph Needham's original text (1978)
The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China, volume 3: an abridgement of Joseph Needham's original text (1978)
Science in Traditional China (1982)
Science in Traditional China : a comparative perspective (1982)
The Genius of China (1986)
Heavenly Clockwork : the great astronomical clocks of medieval China (1986)
The Hall of Heavenly Records : Korean astronomical instruments and clocks, 1380-1780 (1986)

Works about Joseph Needham

Winchester, Simon. The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom. Harper (May 6, 2008). ISBN 978-0060884598