1. Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham was a British biochemist, historian of science and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science and technology, initiating publication of the multivolume Science and Civilisation in China.
Joseph Needham was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1941 and a fellow of the British Academy in 1971.
Joseph Needham's father, born in East London, then a poor section of town, rose to become a Harley Street physician, but frequently battled with Needham's mother.
Barnes inspired an interest in the philosophers and medieval scholastics that Joseph Needham pursued in his father's library.
Joseph Needham later attributed his strong Christian faith to Barnes' philosophical theology, which was founded on rational argument, and attributed his openness to the religions of other cultures to Barnes as well.
In 1914, with the outbreak of World War I, Joseph Needham was sent to Oundle School, founded in 1556 in Northamptonshire.
Joseph Needham did not enjoy leaving home, but he later described the headmaster Frederick William Sanderson as a "man of genius" and said that without that influence on him at a tender age, he might not have attempted his largest work.
Sanderson had been charged by the school's governors with developing a science and technology programme, which included a metal shop that gave the young Joseph Needham a grounding in engineering.
In 1921, Joseph Needham graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Joseph Needham had intended to study medicine, but came under the influence of Frederick Hopkins, resulting in his switch to biochemistry.
In 1939, Joseph Needham referred to his thesis that "man's intellectual progress cannot be understood save in the light of his social progress" illustrated by the historical period which saw the re-birth of experimental science in Europe and in England at the end of the seventeenth century.
Joseph Needham was writing the foreword, with "particular pleasure", to the little book of my friend on the Levellers.
Lu, daughter of a Nanjing pharmacist, taught Joseph Needham Chinese, igniting his interest in China's ancient technological and scientific past.
Joseph Needham then pursued, and mastered, the study of Classical Chinese privately with Gustav Haloun.
Under the Royal Society's direction, Joseph Needham was the director of the Sino-British Science Co-operation Office in Chongqing from 1942 to 1946.
Joseph Needham got to know Zhou Enlai, first Premier of the People's Republic of China, and met numerous Chinese scholars, including the painter Wu Zuoren, and the meteorologist Zhu Kezhen, who later sent crates of books to him in Cambridge, including 2,000 volumes of the Gujin Tushu Jicheng encyclopaedia, a comprehensive record of China's past.
In fact it was Joseph Needham who insisted that science should be included in the organisation's mandate at an earlier planning meeting.
Joseph Needham devoted his energy to the history of Chinese science until his retirement in 1990, even though he continued to teach some biochemistry until 1993.
Joseph Needham's reputation recovered from the Korean affair such that by 1959 he was elected as president of the fellows of Caius College and in 1965 he became Master of the college, a post which he held until he was 76.
In 1948, Joseph Needham proposed a project to the Cambridge University Press for a book on Science and Civilisation in China.
Joseph Needham wrote fifteen volumes himself, and the regular production of further volumes continued after his death in 1995.
However, Joseph Needham disagreed with this initial mode of exchange because of its failure to include nations outside of Europe and America.
Joseph Needham stated that nations outside of the European-American "bright zone", or primary location of scientific advancement, needed the help of international education the most.
Joseph Needham argued that the lack of familiarity between other nations and those in the bright zone made ideological exchange difficult.
Joseph Needham's works attribute significant weight to the impact of Confucianism and Taoism on the pace of Chinese scientific discovery, and emphasises the "diffusionist" approach of Chinese science as opposed to a perceived independent inventiveness in the western world.
Joseph Needham thought the notion that the Chinese script had inhibited scientific thought was "grossly overrated".
Joseph Needham's work has been criticised by most scholars who assert that it has a strong inclination to exaggerate Chinese technological achievements and has an excessive propensity to assume a Chinese origin for the wide range of objects his work covered.
Re-Orient criticizes Joseph Needham for his Eurocentric assumptions borrowed from Marx and the presupposition of Joseph Needham's famous Grand Question that science was a uniquely Western phenomenon.
Barrett asserts in The Woman Who Discovered Printing that Joseph Needham was unduly critical of Buddhism, describing it as having 'tragically played a part in strangling the growth of Chinese science,' to which Joseph Needham readily conceded in a conversation a few years later.
Joseph Needham used this process of selection and re-assembly to argue for a Chinese tradition of science that did not exist as such.
Joseph Needham agreed to be an inspector in North Korea and his report supported the allegations.
In 1965, with Derek Bryan, a retired diplomat whom he first met in China, Joseph Needham established the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, which for some years provided the only way for British subjects to visit the People's Republic of China.
Joseph Needham married the biochemist Dorothy Moyle in 1924 and they became the first husband and wife both to be elected as Fellows of the Royal Society.
Simon Winchester notes that, in his younger days, Joseph Needham was an avid gymnosophist and he was always attracted by pretty women.
In 1989, two years after Dorothy's death, Joseph Needham married Lu, who died two years later.
Joseph Needham suffered from Parkinson's disease from 1982, and died at the age of 94 at his Cambridge home.
Joseph Needham was a high church Anglo-Catholic who worshipped regularly at Ely Cathedral and in the college chapel, but he described himself as an "honorary Taoist".
In 1961, Joseph Needham was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society and in 1966 he became Master of Gonville and Caius College.
In 1979, Joseph Needham received the Dexter Award for Outstanding Achievement in the History of Chemistry from the American Chemical Society.
In 1984, Joseph Needham became the fourth recipient of the JD Bernal Award, awarded by the Society for Social Studies of Science.