Joseph Needham J eph Needham ZOth-Century Renaissance Man by Maurice Goldsmith Profiles UNESCO PUBLISHING Published in 1995 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 7, place de Fontenoy, 75352 Paris 07 SP (France) Layout: Jean-Francis ChCriez Composition: Editions du Mouflon, 94270 Le Kremlin-Bic2tre (France) Printed by Imprimerie Jouve, Paris ISBN 92-3-103192-9 0 UNESCO 1995 Printed in France Foreword The following poem, from the collection entitled Patterns: Poems by Federico Mayor (London, Forest Books, 1994), was selected by the Director-General of UNESCO, Federico Mayor, as a testimony to Joseph Needham, at the author’s request. They filled my hands with jlowers and my neck with garlands. Oh, no, don’t bow down to me. Your welcome makes me blush and reminds me that you have nothing to thank me for! . Later we climb to the Swayambhnatu Temples where the mystic is our equal, preceded as we are by banners, trumpets, ringing of bells and prayers. You, young lama, andI together have felt the same light and dark. Beyond, looms invisible, yet so certain, Everest. In this land high and steep people are born, survive and die unnoticed, indescribable. While we go to mass on Sundays and holy days, bold raffles and draws in guise of charity and regulate everything, even love. you - and you, young lama - think we have understood nothing. Neither the manger, nor the cross, nor the message of Buddha, your lord. When I leave you among the offerings and lamps of Swayambhu I know that we have still not learned to Love. Katmandu, 17 December 1988 Contents Foreword 5 List of illustrations 11 Acknowledgements 13 The author to Joseph Needham 15 Parents and son I9 Egg and embryo 31 Integrative generalist 45 Religion and socialism 59 Second half-life: the Chinese experience 69 UNESCO and science co-operation 89 ‘Peasants’ and Master 99 SCC: the rivers pay court to the sea 105 The Great Dream: Regnum Dei 123 Appendices 131 1 Reminiscences of Joseph Needham, by Wang Ling 133 2 Needham’s closing days, by Stanley Besh 148 3 Honours and decorations 154 4 Publications Books by Joseph Needham, 1925-81 156 Sermons 159 Index 163 To Anna, who understands Nature from growing trees we best discern And man’s estate from social order learn. Translation into Popian Couplet by Joseph Needham of Rjhg tao ming &kg Ti ta0 n-zing shu Verse by Dr Shih Seng-Han of Wuhan University, written in June 1943. List of illustrations 1. Joseph Needham, portrait by James Wood, c. 1963 2. Alicia Montgomery 3. Joseph Needham’s father in Red Cross uniform 4. Joseph Needham as a baby with his mother 5. Joseph Needham, aged about 3 6. Dorothy Needham 7. Joseph and Dorothy Needham, outside the Biochemical Lab, Cambridge, c. 1928 8. Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins O.M., President of the Royal Society, 1930-35, from the portrait by Meredith Frampton, A.R.A. (Photo by courtesy of the Royal Society of London) 9. Notes for Confessio Meeting, 23 October 1968 10. Joseph Needham in Chinese dress, c. 1945 11. Lu Gwei-Djen and Joseph Needham, c. 1980.0 The Scotsman 12. Joseph Needham, Dorothy Needham and Lu Gwei-Djen, Hong Kong, c. 1980 13. Joseph Needham, mid-1980s 14. Joseph Needham in uniform 15. Joseph Needham and five Chinese colleagues in China, 1942-46 16. United Nations General Council, Mexico City Ii’. The picture from the Taoist Genii printed on the cover of each volume of Science and Civilisation in China is part of a painted temple scroll, recent but traditional, given to Brian Harland in Szechuan Province, 1946 18. Joseph Needham, Caius, early 1950s 19. ‘Needham: A Medal’, Cambridge Evening News, 9 July 1994 (Photo: Dave Parfitt) 11 Acknowledgements My thanks to Joseph Needham, who gave me every encourage- ment; his two personal assistants Corinne Lucheux and Tracey Humphries for their never-failing support; various members of the Needham Research Institute (including. the Director, Pro- fessor Ho Peng Yoke, and Deputy Director Dr Christopher Cullen; Angela King; John Moffet, the librarian, and his col- leagues; Stanley Besh and Duncan Manson); Augusta Morton, my invaluable assistant, whose patience is astonishing; Dr Diana Holdright and her mother Angela Ford, relatives of Needham; Alan Mackay, David Barron and David Goldsmith for their com- ments on the manuscript; my wife Anna, for putting up once again with my author’s ‘nerves’. I would also like to thank the United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council for financial support, particularly former Chief Executive Professor Howard Newby, his secre- tary, Sarah Parker, and the current Chief Executive, Professor Ron Amann; Federico Mayor, Director-General of UNESCO, and his assistant Tom Forstenzer; the late Dr Wang Ling and his ., wife Ruth; Dr Christopher Brooke, historian of Gonville and Caius College; the librarians of Cambridge University, the Royal Society and the Athenaeum Club; Margaret Quass; Frank MacManus; and Professor A. Rahman, historian of Indian sci- ence. My thanks also to the Cambridge University Press for granting permission to include extracts from Science and Civili- sation in China and to my indexer, Joe Britton. Colin Ronan, whose sudden death in June 19% is a great loss, had provided some valuable comments: in particular, to 13 / * * CPA Needham adopt the Pinyin transliteration system throughout the book. He had used this in his Shorter Science and Civilisation in China, his ongoing abridgement of Needham’s original text. I have used Needham’s own modification of the Wade-Giles transliteration system for Chinese words in my biography, and the ordinary (unmodified) Wade-Giles system for Wang Ling’s ‘Reminiscences’. I have added the Pinyin transliteration in parentheses following the first mention. The author to Joseph Needham You are a charming and highly intelligent person, one whose company I have enjoyed over many years. I am delighted that you should have asked me to write your authorized biography. This work, published by UNESCO to coincide with the celebration of its fiftieth anniversary, as you were largely respon- sible for the ‘S’ in UNESCO, is not the major full-length study that you merit and on which I am still working. This is merely an introduction to introduce you to a wider audience. But it has not been an easy task. Your challenge to me has been particularly heavy, quite different from the challenge I met when writing of the life of your intimate friend, Desmond Bernal,’ and that of Frederic Joliot-Curie.* They were in a sense ‘more simple and direct’ than you. I find you oh-so-much-more complicated. Of course, I was for- tunate that for three years I was able to visit you regularly in Cambridge and have many hours of discussion, all recorded. What, then, emerges? Clearly, unlike most people, at a very early age, certainly before your teens, you became responsible, as Albert Camus put it, for your ‘face’. I describe that in my opening chapter and then go on to clarify how your ‘face’ has been further shaped by what life has done to you. As a result you emerge as an individual, rare in any period, who through a 1. Maurice Goldsmith, Sage, A Life of J. D. Bernal, London, Heine- mann, 1980. 2. Maurice Goldsmith, F&d&c Joliot-Curie, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1976. 15 / 0 5 CPh Needham deeply held unitary world-view has developed concepts that have helped to reshape our social, political and theological views and behaviour. From childhood onwards you have seen yourself as a ‘bridge-builder’: searching always, as you say, ‘for a reconcilia- tion, for a union of things separated’. You have been successful in storming us in four main fields: morphology and biochemis- try; science and religion; socialism and social responsibility; and, above all, in China and the Western world. In that last field, the die was cast in 1937 when four Chinese post-graduate students came to Cambridge to do research in bio- chemistry and you fell in love with China. You began to orches- trate a new reality in seeking to provide an answer to the key question of why Chinese science never developed as did West- ern science at the Renaissance. That was when your second half- life began. You became the historian of Chinese science and civi- lization, and in so doing, you changed historiography world- wide. You have allied polymath learning with a powerful imagi- nation, a mind open to all forms of cultural experience. This Confucian analect is relevant: ‘For him who respects the dignity of man, and practises what love and courtesy require, for him all men within the four seas are brothers.’ And yet, and yet - I found your deeply held religious beliefs difficult to square with your activity as a scientist. As you point out, that is my problem not yours. And, once again, you have acted as a ‘bridge-builder.’ As American cosmologist 16 The author to Joseph Needham Frank J. Tipler states: ‘It is time scientists reconsider the God hypothesis. The time has come to absorb theology into phys- ics, to make Heaven as real as an electron.” For you holiness is not just a belief, but an experience as vivid as sexual pleasure or hunger,4 and the Kingdom of God on Earth - that is, a world co-operative community - is a dream that has been, and still is, with you each day of your long life. I see you as an authentically great man. This biography is an introduction to explain why I do. Maurice Goldsmith P.S. Since I wrote the above, I have experienced the sadness of your death on the evenin g of Friday, 24 March 1995.