Book completed
Jun. 26th, 2024 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeThe Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom, by Simon Winchester. Several times recently I had come across mention of a book called Science and Civilization in China, by Joseph Needham, so I checked to see if our local public library had a copy. No, but it did have a biography of Needham, written by a man who'd authored several other books I'd enjoyed. Why a biography but not the book itself? I decided to take a look. It turns out that Science and Civilization in China is basically an encyclopedia, of 24 volumes with probably more to come, mostly written by this one person!
Joseph Needham, born in 1900, was an eccentric biochemist at Cambridge, with an open marriage, a devotion to socialism, and a passion for Morris dancing. In 1937, a female biochemist from China came to work with his team at Cambridge, and he fell passionately in love with her and asked her to start teaching him Chinese, which he learned very quickly. They realized that China had invented a great many things far before they were invented in the West, and wondered why. Not long after that, he received a diplomatic assignment to live in western China, the part that hadn't yet been conquered by Japan, and to travel around, meet various scientists, and do whatever he could to facilitate their research, which often involved having special equipment bought and shipped to wherever they were living. This was also a great opportunity to collect all the information he could about earlier Chinese inventions. Upon his return to Cambridge, he set about writing up everything he'd learned.
The rest of his life was pretty interesting, too - for example, there was a time during the Cold War when the Chinese claimed that the Americans had been dropping disease-infested rodents into villages as biological warfare, and Needham headed up the international team investigating the truth of the claims. He thought they were plausible, for two reasons: (1) He couldn't believe that the scientists he'd met previously would lie to him, and (2) there was additional evidence, although it turned out in retrospect to have been staged by the Soviet Union. Winchester is a good storyteller, and Needham's life was indeed extraordinary.
Joseph Needham, born in 1900, was an eccentric biochemist at Cambridge, with an open marriage, a devotion to socialism, and a passion for Morris dancing. In 1937, a female biochemist from China came to work with his team at Cambridge, and he fell passionately in love with her and asked her to start teaching him Chinese, which he learned very quickly. They realized that China had invented a great many things far before they were invented in the West, and wondered why. Not long after that, he received a diplomatic assignment to live in western China, the part that hadn't yet been conquered by Japan, and to travel around, meet various scientists, and do whatever he could to facilitate their research, which often involved having special equipment bought and shipped to wherever they were living. This was also a great opportunity to collect all the information he could about earlier Chinese inventions. Upon his return to Cambridge, he set about writing up everything he'd learned.
The rest of his life was pretty interesting, too - for example, there was a time during the Cold War when the Chinese claimed that the Americans had been dropping disease-infested rodents into villages as biological warfare, and Needham headed up the international team investigating the truth of the claims. He thought they were plausible, for two reasons: (1) He couldn't believe that the scientists he'd met previously would lie to him, and (2) there was additional evidence, although it turned out in retrospect to have been staged by the Soviet Union. Winchester is a good storyteller, and Needham's life was indeed extraordinary.