Joseph Needham

Needham's father, Joseph, was a doctor, and his mother, Alicia Adelaïde, née Montgomery (1863–1945), 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.

Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham (9 December 1900 – 24 March 1995) 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.

A focus of his was what has come to be called the Needham Question of why and how China had ceded its leadership in Science and Technology to Western countries.

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.

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.

After graduation, Needham was elected to a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College and worked in Hopkins' laboratory at the University Department of Biochemistry, specialising in embryology and morphogenesis.

His three-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.

Including this history reflected Needham's fear that overspecialization would hold back scientific progress and that social and historical forces shaped science.

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.

Three Chinese scientists came to Cambridge for graduate study in 1937: Lu Gwei-djen, Wang Ying-lai, and Shen Shih-Chang (, the only one under Needham's tutelage).

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.

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.

He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1941 and a fellow of the British Academy in 1971.

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.

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.