Essay reviews: A window on the East

Abstract

Reviewing Science and civilisation in China by Joseph Needham and others. Cambridge University Press. Joseph Needham was elected into the Fellowship in 1941, rather late in relation to his brilliant career. Research and teaching in biochemistry had already occupied him for more than 15 years; his magnum opus in that science, the three-volume Chemical embryology , was 10 years old. He had published a number of books of a more general character, such as The sceptical biologist (1929) and A history of embryology (1934) which had aroused considerable interest, not only among fellow-scientists. He had been Sir William Dunn Reader in Biochemistry at Cambridge since 1933, a post he would hold to the retiring age. Needham already (in 1941) had some claim to be considered the greatest polymath of the 20th century; it was less easy to detect that his best days as a laboratory scientist were past. In 1942 the War took him to China as Head of a British Scientific Mission to the government of Chiang Kai Shek at Chungking; then for two years after the War (1946-48) he was Director of the Department of Natural Sciences at UNESCO in Paris. Upon his return to Cambridge he was at last able to devote himself almost wholly to a task long prepared, the writing of a history of Chinese science and technology.