Joseph Needham

65
Joseph Needham bigraphy, stories - British biochemist

Joseph Needham : biography

6 December 1900 – 24 March 1995

Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, CH, FRS, FBA (9 December 1900 – 24 March 1995), also known as Li Yuese (), was a British scientist, historian and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1941, and as a fellow of the British Academy in 1971. In 1992, the Queen conferred on him the Companionship of Honour and the Royal Society noted he was the only living person to hold these three titles.

Offices held

Honours and awards

In 1961, Needham was awarded the George 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.

  • Order of the Companions of Honour, 1992.
  • British Academy, 1971.
  • Royal Society, 1941.

Notes

Biography

Early years

Needham was the only child of a London family. His father was a doctor and his mother, Alicia Adelaïde Montgomery (1863–1945), was a French-Irish composer and music teacher. Needham was educated at Oundle School founded in 1556 in Northamptonshire, before receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1921 from the University of Cambridge, master’s degree in January 1925 and doctorate in October 1925. He had intended to study medicine but came under the influence of Frederick Gowland Hopkins and switched to Biochemistry.

Career

After graduation, he worked in Hopkins’s laboratory at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, specialising in embryology and morphogenesis. His 3-volume work Chemical Embryology, published in 1931, includes a history of embryology from Egyptian times up to the early 19th century, including quotations in most European languages. His Silliman memorial lecture of 1936 was published by Yale University 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 during and after World War II.

Three Chinese scientists came to work with Needham in 1937: Lu Gwei-djen (), Wang Ying-lai (王應睞), and Chen Shi-zhang (沈詩章). Lu (1904–91), daughter of a Nanjingese 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.Gregory, ‘Joseph Needham,’ in Peter Harman, Simon Mitton, (eds.) Cambridge scientific minds,Cambridge University Press, 2002 pp.299-312, p.305.

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 ended in far west in Xinjiang at the caves in Dunhuang at the end of the Great Wall where the first printed 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 England through diplomatic channels and were to form the foundation of his later research. He got to know Zhou Enlai and met numerous Chinese scholars, including the painter Wu Zuoren (吳作人), and the meteorologist Zhu Kezhen who later sent crates of books to him in Cambridge, including the 2,000 volumes of the Gujin Tushu Jicheng encyclopedia, a comprehensive record of China’s past.