Joseph Needham, a gifted polymath

摘要

Joseph Needham's death on 24 March this year, aged 94, almost exactly coincided with the publication of Volume V Part 6 of his magisterial Science and Civilisation in China, and this conjunction prompts a tribute to both the man and his work. Perhaps surprisingly, his brilliant career as a sinologist began only in middle life, though it developed as a natural consequence of earlier experience. By training he was a physiologist, and after graduating at Cambridge in 1922 went on to do research there with Frederick Gowland Hopkins in the newly created department of biochemistry. There he was assigned the task of investigating the development of the chick embryo in the egg. With prescience, his approach to this might have given a clue to the shape of things to come.