Book reviews: Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China

Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China Simon Winchester Viking 2008 HB 336 £20.00 978-0670913787 ![][1] One of the great synoptic works of human developmental biology is a three-volume work that was published by Cambridge University Press in 1931. Over 2000 pages long, Chemical Embryology provides not only an exhaustive account of changes in the embryo and placenta (osmotic pressure, pH, respiratory gradients, metabolic processes) but a descriptive history of the egg from its earliest mythic beginnings. ‘Practically nothing was left out,’ wrote its author — one Joseph Needham, born 1900, only son of a Harley Street physician specialising in anaesthetics and an erratic, high-strung mother (who so seldom saw eye to eye with her husband that she called her son by a different Christian name). Leading light of the Cambridge Biochemical Laboratory, he was already being hailed as the new Erasmus, so impressive were his intellectual reach and vigour. He did have the benefits of a photographic memory. His wife Dorothy — ‘Dophi’ — Moyle, herself a noted biochemist, recalled him lying awake in bed, energised by the work he had been doing: ‘mentally visualising the book's page proofs, and then correcting in a notebook any errors or infelicities’ (p28).1 Needham liked bringing things between covers, and it wasn't always writings on developmental biology. Wayward driver of an Armstrong Siddeley tourer, brazen nude-bather, radical activist, liberal Anglo-Catholic, and keen morris dancer, he was also acquiring a considerable reputation as a skirt-chaser. Being an eccentric in Cambridge went with the turf; being unsound was to invite social ostracism. But Needham knew how to toe the line: he just had to be brilliant. Then in 1936, three Chinese research assistants came to work in his lab. He began a relationship with the female member of the team, Lu Gwei-djen, a physiologist from Nanjing: their affair was to last, with the complaisance of Dophi, for the next … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif