Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham,
CH,
FRS,
FBA (9 December 1900 – 24 March 1995), also known as
Li Yuese (), was a British
academic and
sinologist known for his research and writing on the history of
Chinese science. He was elected a fellow of the
Royal Society in 1941;
[Winchester, Simon. (2008). The Man Who Loved China, pp. 28-29.] and he was elected a fellow of the
British Academy in 1971.
[Winchester, p. 238.] 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.
[Winchester, p. 250.]Biography
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. After graduation, he worked in
F.G. Hopkins's laboratory at
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, specialising in
embryology and
morphogenesis. Although his career as
biochemist and an academic was well established, his career developed in unanticipated directions during and after World War II.
Career
Three Chinese scientists came to work with Needham in 1936:
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
Classical Chinese. This ignited Needham's interest in China's technological and scientific past.
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 (王玲), 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 Zuo ren (吳作人), 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 now 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. 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—see
Needham's SCC organizating scheme:
- Vol. VII. The Social Background
Evaluations and critiques
"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 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.
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 susceptible of 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.
Needham's accusations against
Confucianism and
Taoism can arguably be seen as simply reflecting early Chinese
Communist hostility to these rival thought systems. 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 《古今图书集成》/《古今圖書集成》. 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 247 characters used in the
Tamil script), bearing in mind that proximity to China usually meant that these civilisations tended to get developments such as
block printing before the West.
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. 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
Dorothy Moyle (1896–1987).
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 was endowed in honour of Joseph Needham as the
Joseph Needham Professorship of Chinese History, Science, and Civilization.
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.
Bibliography
- Science, Religion and Reality (1925)
- Chemical Embryology (1931)
- The Great Amphibium: Four Lectures on the Position of Religion in a World Dominated by Science (1931)
- Perspectives in Biochemistry: Thirty-One Essays Presented to Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins by Past and Present Members of His Laboratory (1937)
- Time: The Refreshing River (Essays and Addresses, 1932-1942) (1943)
- History Is On Our Side (1947)
- Science Outpost; Papers of the Sino-British Science Co-Operation Office (British Council Scientific Office in China) 1942-1946 (1948)
- Science and Civilization in China, by Joseph Needham, with the research assistance [and collaboration] of Wang Ling (1954-59) (2 volumes)
- A History of Embryology (1959)
- The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (1969)
- Within the Four Seas: The Dialogue of East and West (1969)
- Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West: Lectures and Addresses on the History of Science and Technology (1970)
- Chinese Science: Explorations of an Ancient Tradition (1973)
- Moulds of Understanding: A Pattern of Natural Philosophy (1976)
- The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China (3 volumes) (1978) - an abridgement of the 1954- version.
- Science in Traditional China : A Comparative Perspective (1982)
- The Genius of China (1986)
- Heavenly Clockwork : The Great Astronomical Clocks of Medieval China (1986)
- The Hall of Heavenly Records : Korean Astronomical Instruments and Clocks, 1380-1780 (1986)
Science and Civilisation in China volumes
See also
