__Joseph Needham__ ( 9 December 1900 – 24 March 1995) was a British biochemist, historian and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Science and technology in China.
- Science and Civilisation in China - Needham Question - Needham Question Critiques - Needham Research Institute
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 - wikipedia 
Joseph Needham. British biochemist
- wikimedia.org
# Early years
Needham was the only child of a London family. His father was a doctor, and his mother, Alicia Adélaide Needham, was a music composer from Oldcastle, Co. Meath, Ireland. Needham was educated at Oundle School (founded in 1556 in Northamptonshire) before attending Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1921, Master of Arts (Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin) in January 1925, and DPhil in October 1925. He had intended to study medicine, but came under the influence of Frederick Hopkins, resulting in his switch to biochemistry - wikipedia
# Career
After graduation, he 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. His 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 - wikipedia
Tang Fei-fan and Joseph Needham in Kunming, Yunnan 1944
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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 Cambridge for graduate study in 1937: Lu Gwei-djen, Wang Ying-lai and Shen Shih-Chang (沈詩章, 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.
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 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, France. 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 1966.
Needham's reputation recovered from the Korean affair (see below) such that by 1959 he was elected as president of the fellows of Caius College and in 1965 he became Master (head) of the College, a post which he held until he was 76.
# Political involvement
Needham's political views were unorthodox and his lifestyle controversial. His left-wing stance was based in an idiosyncratic form of Christian socialism and after 1949 his sympathy with Chinese culture was extended to the new government.
During his stay in China, Needham was asked to analyse some cattle-cakes that 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. During the Korean War further accusations were made that the Americans had used biological warfare.
Zhou Enlai coordinated an international campaign to enlist Needham for a study commission, tacitly offering access to materials and contacts in China needed for his then early research. Needham agreed to be an inspector in North Korea and his report supported the Germ warfare in the Korean War.
After post-Cold War revelations that the Soviet Union had assisted the Chinese in setting up false scenarios, Needham's biographer Simon Winchester commented that:<blockquote>Needham was intellectually in love with communism; and yet communist spymasters and agents, it turned out, had pitilessly duped him.</blockquote>
Needham was blacklisted by the US government until well into the 1970s - wikipedia
In 1965, with Derek Bryan (diplomat), a retired diplomat whom he first met in China, 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. On a visit to China in 1964 he was met by Zhou Enlai, but on a visit in 1972 he was deeply depressed by the changes under the Cultural Revolution.
# Personal life
Needham married the biochemist Dorothy M. Needham (1896–1987) in 1924 and they became the first husband and wife both to be elected as Fellows of the Royal Society - wikipedia
Simon Winchester notes that, in his younger days, Needham was an avid gymnosophy and he was always attracted by pretty women. When he and Lu Gwei-djen met in 1937, they fell deeply in love, which Dorothy accepted. The three of them eventually lived contentedly on the same road in Cambridge for many years.
In 1989, two years after Dorothy's death, Needham married Lu, who died two years later. 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 his honour as the Joseph Needham Professorship of Chinese History, Science, and Civilization.
Needham was a high church Anglo-Catholic who worshipped regularly at Ely Cathedral and in the college chapel, but he also described himself as an "honorary Taoist".
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