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Joseph Needham: An Extraordinary Man
| Article
# : |
11547 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1986 |
3,462 Words |
| Author
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Brian Wijeratne
Brian Wijeratne learned to play cricket in Sri Lanka, where
he
was Outstanding Cricketer of the Year in 1964. Invited to
play for the MCC in 1968, he was elected a playing member in
1969 and since that time has been active as a player and a
coach. |
The challenge was to demonstrate how blood pigment developed in the first three weeks of growth within the hen's egg. "How on earth could it happen, how is the synthesis performed? There is no blood at the beginning but quite a lot in the end," Joseph Needham recalled with a twinkle in his eye.
Seizing upon this question with characteristic enthusiasm, the young scientist began the work in "chemical embryology" and 'biochemistry and morphogenesis" that would gain him membership in the Royal Society.
In the United Kingdom, the Royal Society claims patronage for natural science, while the British Academy does so for the arts and humanities. Election to fellowship of either body is nothing less than securing the esteem and trust of professionally competent people in one's own field. To be fellow of both the society and the academy is a rare honor that Joseph Needham has enjoyed, which indicates the astonishing breadth of his world outlook. His wife, Dorothy Moyle, a biochemist, was also elected to the Royal Society fellowship, and they became the first husband-wife couple ever to achieve this distinction in their own right.
Born in 1900, Joseph Needham grew up in a very large house in London as an only child. The young Needham found the library a most interesting place, and he went there to cultivate his appetite for reading.
Attending an English public school that included "a lot of classics," Needham noted that "one of the remarkable things there was that you also had to do a certain amount of time in workshops. So I got to know about lathes, machines, and all the basic engineering. Everybody had to do that. I did not do much physics and maths, but certainly acquired the rudiments of engineering technology." There were other experiences too. "It was possible,” he remembers, "to do work in the biology laboratories in one's spare time and the result of that was I found myself on Speech Day occasions demonstrating nucleated blood corpuscles to visitors like H.G. Wells and Frederick Gowland Hopkins."
Religious studies were an influence in boyhood also, and Needham recalled his experience of Christianity at eleven when he "was taken up by his father to the Temple Church in London, every Sunday, where Dr. E.W. Barnes - gifted mathematician, fellow of the Royal Society, later Bishop Birmingham - was giving sermons. Barnes' ideas on what constituted a sermon wee marvelous, it was almost a lecture: He would talk about the Gnostics one
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