KEY POINTS:
The difficulty with Simon Winchester's biography of Cambridge don Joseph Needham, the British biochemist known for his voluminous works on the history of Chinese science, comes early. Needham, it seems, was an avid gymnosophist - a nudist. Fair enough. But Winchester's descriptions - "Needham knew he could not only cavort bare in the Moonellas' garden at Wickford, but also swim naked in an informally reserved stretch of the river Cam ..." - strike an absurdist note.
Add to this Needham's penchant for morris dancing - "he loved the flamboyance and the merriment ... the men dressed in loose white fustian with coloured baldrics ... bells on their ankles ..." - and it begins to read like a Monty Python script. Then again, Needham was undoubtedly a strange fish and life at Cambridge in the 1920s and 30s was never dull.
Drawing much from Needham's diaries, Winchester charts a progressive lifestyle - open marriage, numerous extra-marital affairs, plus religion mixed with an extremely left-wing bent. Then there's his mistress, the Chinese scientist, Lu Gwei-djen, who he later married and who ignited his love of China.
Needham was the director of the Sino-British Science Co-operation Office in Chongqing from 1942 to 1946. It was an assistance program that saw him travel the vast country to find out what various academic institutions needed during the Japanese invasion. It was during this time that Needham began to develop his big idea - his massive Science and Civilisation in China, which ran to 18 volumes when he died in 1995.
Much of Winchester's narrative is overly detailed and sometimes repetitive, but is told with the gusto of one clearly enamoured by a great man and his exotic adventures. The meeting with New Zealander Rewi Alley, "an eager nudist", is an opportunity to return to earlier themes. "To all who saw his [Needham's] performance that August evening the image of morris dancing in China remained profoundly haunting." But Needham's Chinese adventures uncover extraordinary unknown facts - that China began printing 600 years before Johannes Gutenberg introduced the technique in Germany.
The Chinese also had the first chain drive 700 years before the Europeans and a magnetic compass at least a century before its first reference elsewhere. "Needham's Grand Question" is why such fervent endeavour suddenly shut down in the 1500s. Why did China become isolated and xenophobic, just when modern science and industry began blooming in the West? Needham's eccentricities do, however, catch up with him and lead to a blunder that seriously affects his career - his support of the controversial Chinese communist claims of American biological warfare in North Korea during the Korean War.
Winchester comments: "Needham was intellectually in love with communism; and yet communist spymasters and agents, it turned out, had pitilessly duped him." It seems an overly generous analysis. Surely a biochemist worth his salt would have checked the evidence more closely.
Winchester does, however, also refer to the view that Needham had been foolish, eccentric, out of touch and, as "one very hostile obituarist" put it, "a fathead". Needham's support for the dubiously documented investigation led to him being blacklisted by the Americans well into the 1970s and ostracised by the British establishment.
Eventually, his scholarship won through and Needham was able to throw himself into his great work at his beloved Cambridge. But there is an anticlimax. While Needham documents Chinese scientific discovery like no other, he's never able to answer his central question as to why it stopped. Winchester suggests: "Perhaps it was because he was too close to the topic, seeing many trees but not enough forest."
Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China
By Simon Winchester (Viking $40)
* Chris Barton is a Herald features writer.
