Early years
Needham was the only child of a London family. His father was a Scottish doctor and his mother, Alicia Adelaïde Montgomery (1863—1945), was a French-Irish composer and music teacher. Needham was educated at Oundle School, before receiving his bachelor's degree in 1921 from Cambridge University, master's degree in January 1925 and doctorate in October 1925. He had intended reading 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.
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 (???), and Chen Shi-zhang (???). Lu (1904—91), daughter of a Nanjingese pharmacist, taught Needham Chinese, igniting his interest in China's technological and scientific past. He then pursued, and mastered, the study of Classical Chinese privately with Gustav Haloun.
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 (??), 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 (???), 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.
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.
Science and Civilisation in China
In 1943, 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 (SCC) published by the Cambridge University Press. The project is still proceeding under the guidance of the Publications Board of the Needham Research Institute, chaired by Christopher Cullen.
The massive project produced a series of volumes under Needham's direct supervision; and the regular production of further volumes continued after his death in 1995. After volume III the volumes were split into parts and currently 27 volumes have been published. Successive volumes have been published as they became ready, which means that they have not appeared in the order originally contemplated in the project's prospectus.
Needham's organising schema:
- 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 Civilization in China for a full list
The Needham Question
"Needham's Grand Question", also known as "The Needham 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.Needham's accusations against Confucianism and Taoism can arguably be seen as simply reflecting early Chinese Communist hostility to these rival thought systems.
Nathan Sivin, one of Needham's collaborators, while agreeing that Needham's achievement was monumental, suggested that the "Needham question", as a counterfactual hypothesis, was not conducive to a useful answer: "It is striking that this question — Why didn't the Chinese beat Europeans to the Scientific Revolution? — happens to be one of the few questions that people often ask in public places about why something didn't happen in history. It is analogous to the question of why your name did not appear on page 3 of today's newspaper." Sivin's criticism can arguably be rejected as ruling out all discussion of causes in history, on the basis that the cause of every historical event is that if it hadn't occurred that would be counterfactual, and thus supposedly not susceptible of a useful answer.
A common (though disputed) alternative answer to the Needham Question is that China had no equivalent of the alphabet. Among other alleged consequences, it could not gain the full benefits of movable type printing. Among other disadvantages (such as allegedly making it harder for people to learn to read and write ), complete type-sets were very expensive. For instance, in 1725, the Qing Dynasty government had to make 250,000 bronze movable type characters to print 64 sets of the encyclopedic
Gujin Tushu Jicheng Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings from the Earliest to Current Times ????????/????????. The Needham question then arguably must be re-phrased to ask why the distant West was able to beat every other civilisation with an alphabet (such as Islam's Arabic alphabet), or with other small character sets (such as the Linear B Mycenaean alphabet which was as old as 1500 BCE ), bearing in mind that proximity to China usually meant that these civilisations tended to get developments such as block printing before the West.
Evaluations and critiques
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.
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. During Needham's stay in China, Needham was asked to analyze some cattle-cakes which the Communists claimed had been scattered by American aircraft in the south of China at the end of World War II, and found they were impregnated with anthrax. For this reason, Needham agreed to be an inspector in North Korea (1952—53) during the Korean War and in his report he supported the controversial Chinese communist claims that the Americans had used biological warfare there. 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.
Personal life
Needham was first married to the biochemist Dorothy Moyle (1896—1987) in 1924 and they became the first husband and wife couple to both be elected as Fellows of the Royal Society.Simon Winchester notes that, in his younger days, Needham was an avid gymnosophist. In 1989, two years after Dorothy's death, Needham married Lu Gwei-djen (1904—1991). 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, a post never awarded to Needham, was endowed in honour of Joseph Needham as the Joseph Needham Professorship of Chinese History, Science, and Civilization.
