If you enjoy browsing in public libraries, as I do, you have doubtless come across a massive series of books that fills two complete shelves and is titled, “Science and Civilization in China” by Joseph Needham. If you have opened any of these tomes, you will have discovered, as I did, that their all-embracing title is exactly correct and that most of their thousands of learned pages were in fact written by one man. When Joseph Needham died in 1995 at the age of 94, he was still writing this greatest work of scholarship on China by a Westerner (or perhaps by anyone.) Now Simon Winchester has written an engaging biography of Needham and his masterpiece, which helps us understand the passions that energized this man and his work.

Long before he came to love China, Needham had a brilliant career as a biochemist at Cambridge University, where he wrote “Chemical Embryology,” a three-volume history of embryology that earned him an appointment (at the age of 40) to the Royal Society, the greatest scientific distinction short of a Nobel Prize. During the winter of 1937-38 (between the publication of his book and his appointment to the Royal Society), Needham met Lu Gwei-djen, who came from a highly regarded Chinese family and who had been educated at Nanjing’s Ginling College for Girls, operated by Smith College in Massachusetts. Her arrival in Cambridge transformed Needham’s life, and it was their love for each other that led him both to the determination to become proficient in Mandarin Chinese and, in turn, to an insatiable curiosity about Chinese science and civilization.

Winchester does a fine job of charting his narrative through a minefield of temptingly superficial, sensational and utterly false readings of Needham’s life. This is not a story of academic marital infidelity or of the sexual exploitation by an older professor of a beautiful, young scholar. Needham and his wife, Dorothy, had what they both called an open marriage, which lasted for more than six decades. There was only a three-year’s difference in age between Needham and Lu Gwei-djen. And he did everything to support the independence of her career, including her appointment to the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, which meant long periods of separation.

Although Needham (despite his life-long attachment to Cambridge) was not part of the famous Bloomsbury Group that included Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell, there are many similarities between their lives and careers and his. His incredible capacity for brilliant intellectual work recalls Leslie Stephen’s “Dictionary of National Biography” and James Strachey’s great translation of the complete works of Freud. His left-wing politics (he was a communist), sexual liberation (he was a confirmed nudist), and his eccentricities (he was a passionately accomplished morris dancer) are also reminiscent of that slightly older London set. But perhaps more important still was his genius for friendships that were deeply loyal and lasting.

When Needham at last arrived in China in 1943, it was as a representative of the British government’s Sino-British Science Cooperation Office, whose mission was “to bring succor and comfort to China’s academic community,” which was being destroyed by war. Winchester puts it this way: “He was to ‘cheer them up a bit.’ He was to remind them they were not alone, that the world was thinking of them. But fine words butter no parsnips: what was really needed, Needham discovered as he made his first rounds of the ramshackle capital city, was supplies — laboratory equipment, reference books and scientific journals. The universities inside free China needed to know what was going on in the world outside, and thus informed, they needed to begin their own research all over again.”

But as Needham soon discovered as he traveled the length and breadth of China, it was the West that needed even more to know what was going on outside, especially what had been happening scientifically and culturally in China for centuries. From the moment of his arrival in China Needham began to collect detailed information about Chinese skills, traditions, discoveries and medicines. These were to be the mainstays of his mammoth series of books. Winchester helpfully lists in an appendix to his book “Chinese Inventions and Discoveries with Dates of First Mention.” The list begins with abacus (AD 190) and acupuncture (580 BC) and goes on for pages to printing with woodblocks (7th century AD), two-stage rockets (AD 1360), seismography (AD 132), winnowing machine (1st century BC) and zoetrope (AD 180).

-- Michael Payne writes and lectures on literature and critical theory. He lives in Lewisburg and can be reached at payne@bucknell.edu.