Joseph Needham


Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham was a British biochemist, historian of science and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science and technology, initiating publication of the multivolume Science and Civilisation in China. He called attention to what has come to be known as the Needham Question, of why and how China had ceded its leadership in science and technology to Western countries.
He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1941 and a fellow of the British Academy in 1971. In 1992, Queen Elizabeth II conferred on him the Order of the Companions of Honour, and the Royal Society noted he was the only living person to hold these three titles.

Early life

Needham's father, Joseph, was a doctor, and his mother, Alicia Adelaïde, née Montgomery, was a music composer from Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland. His father, born in East London, then a poor section of town, rose to become a Harley Street physician, but frequently battled with Needham's mother. The young Needham often mediated. In his early teens, he was taken to hear the Sunday lectures of Ernest Barnes, a professional mathematician who became Master of the Temple, a royal church in London. Barnes inspired an interest in the philosophers and medieval scholastics that Needham pursued in his father's library. Needham later attributed his strong Christian faith to Barnes' philosophical theology, which was founded on rational argument, and attributed his openness to the religions of other cultures to Barnes as well.
In 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, Needham was sent to Oundle School, founded in 1556 in Northamptonshire. He did not enjoy leaving home, but he later described the headmaster Frederick William Sanderson as a "man of genius" and said that without that influence on him at a tender age, he might not have attempted his largest work. Sanderson had been charged by the school's governors with developing a science and technology programme, which included a metal shop that gave the young Needham a grounding in engineering. Sanderson also emphasised to the boys of the school that co-operation led to higher human achievement than competition and that knowledge of history was necessary to build a better future. The Bible, in Sanderson's teaching, supplied archaeological knowledge to compare with the present. During school holidays, Needham assisted his father in the operating rooms of several wartime hospitals, an experience that convinced him that he was not interested in becoming a surgeon. The Royal Navy, however, appointed him a surgeon sub-lieutenant, a position that he held for only a few months.

Education

In 1921, Needham graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
In January 1925, Needham earned an MA. In October 1925, Needham earned a PhD. He had intended to study medicine, but came under the influence of Frederick Hopkins, resulting in his switch to biochemistry.

Career

After graduation, Needham was elected to a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College and worked in Gowland Hopkins' laboratory at the University Department of Biochemistry, specialising in embryology and morphogenesis. His three-volume work Chemical Embryology, published in 1931, included a classic study on the history of embryology stretching back from Egyptian times up to the early 19th century, and these chapters were later published under the title A History of Embryology in 1934. Including this history reflected Needham's fear that overspecialization would hold back scientific progress and that social and historical forces shaped science. At that time Cambridge school of biochemistry were recognised for imaginative exploratory science and had outstanding scientists Hopkins, Dorothy M. Needham, Robin Hill, Barcroft who were joined by Rudi Lemberg on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship.
In 1936, he and several other Cambridge scientists founded the History of Science Committee. The Committee included conservatives but also Marxists like J.D. Bernal, whose views on the social and economic frameworks of science influence Needham.
Needham's Terry Lecture of 1936 was published by Cambridge University Press in association with Yale University Press under the title of Order and Life. In 1939 he produced a massive work on morphogenesis that a Harvard reviewer claimed "will go down in the history of science as Joseph Needham's magnum opus," little knowing what would come later.
Although his career as biochemist and an academic was well established, his career developed in unanticipated directions with World War II with his evident interest in history. In 1939, Needham referred to his thesis that "man's intellectual progress cannot be understood save in the light of his social progress" illustrated by the historical period which saw the re-birth of experimental science in Europe and in England at the end of the seventeenth century. He was writing the foreword, with "particular pleasure", to the little book of my friend on the Levellers. Needham wrote: "Merton has shown how puritan were the early Fellows of the Royal Society." And goes on to acknowledge Holorenshaw in pointing out: "that no less than the men of property, the Levellers realised the social importance of science, and foresaw the part it would one day play in human welfare."
Three Chinese scientists came to Cambridge for graduate study in 1937: Lu Gwei-djen, Wang Ying-lai, and Shen Shih-Chang. Lu, daughter of a Nanjing pharmacist, taught Needham Chinese, igniting his interest in China's ancient technological and scientific past. He then pursued, and mastered, the study of Classical Chinese privately with Gustav Haloun. File:Tang Fei-fan and Joseph Needham in 1944.jpg|thumb|Tang Fei-fan and Joseph Needham in Kunming, Yunnan 1944
Under the Royal Society's direction, Needham was the director of the Sino-British Science Co-operation Office in Chongqing from 1942 to 1946. During this time he made several long journeys through war-torn China and many smaller ones, visiting scientific and educational establishments and obtaining for them much needed supplies. His longest trip in late 1943 ended in far west in Gansu at the caves in Dunhuang at the end of the Great Wall where the earliest dated printed book - a copy of the Diamond Sutra - was found. The other long trip reached Fuzhou on the east coast, returning across the Xiang River just two days before the Japanese blew up the bridge at Hengyang and cut off that part of China. In 1944 he visited Yunnan in an attempt to reach the Burmese border. Everywhere he went he purchased and was given old historical and scientific books which he shipped back to Britain through diplomatic channels. They were to form the foundation of his later research. He got to know Zhou Enlai, first Premier of the People's Republic of China, and met numerous Chinese scholars, including the painter Wu Zuoren, and the meteorologist Zhu Kezhen, who later sent crates of books to him in Cambridge, including 2,000 volumes of the Gujin Tushu Jicheng encyclopaedia, a comprehensive record of China's past.
On his return to Europe, he was asked by Julian Huxley to become the first head of the Natural Sciences Section of UNESCO in Paris. In fact it was Needham who insisted that science should be included in the organisation's mandate at an earlier planning meeting.
After two years in which the suspicions of the Americans over scientific co-operation with communists intensified, Needham resigned in 1948 and returned to Gonville and Caius College, where he resumed his fellowship and his rooms, which were soon filled with his books.
He devoted his energy to the history of Chinese science until his retirement in 1990, even though he continued to teach some biochemistry until 1993. Needham's reputation recovered from the Korean affair such that by 1959 he was elected as president of the fellows of Caius College and in 1965 he became Master of the college, a post which he held until he was 76.

''Science and Civilisation in China''

In 1948, Needham proposed a project to the Cambridge University Press for a book on Science and Civilisation in China. Within weeks of being accepted, the project had grown to seven volumes, and it has expanded ever since. His initial collaborator was the historian Wang Ling, whom he had met in Lizhuang and obtained a position for at Trinity. The first years were devoted to compiling a list of every mechanical invention and abstract idea that had been made and conceived in China. These included cast iron, the ploughshare, the stirrup, gunpowder, printing, the magnetic compass and clockwork escapements, most of which were thought at the time to be western inventions. The first volume eventually appeared in 1954.
The publication received widespread acclaim, which intensified to lyricism as the further volumes appeared. He wrote fifteen volumes himself, and the regular production of further volumes continued after his death in 1995. Later, Volume III was divided, so that 27 volumes have now been published. Successive volumes are published as they are completed, which means that they do not appear in the order originally contemplated in the project's prospectus.
Needham's final organizing schema was:
  • Vol. I. Introductory Orientations
  • Vol. II. History of Scientific Thought
  • Vol. III. Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and Earth
  • Vol. IV. Physics and Physical Technology
  • Vol. V. Chemistry and Chemical Technology
  • Vol. VI. Biology and Biological Technology
  • Vol. VII. The Social Background
See Science and Civilisation in China for a full list.
The project is still proceeding under the guidance of the Publications Board of the Needham Research Institute, directed by Professor Mei Jianjun.