Terence RUSSELL

Joseph Needham, with his wife Dorothy Needham, outside the Biochemical Lab, Cambridge, 1928–1929. Needham’s tour de force, the multivolume Science and Civilisation in China, documents the country’s achievements in science, mathematics, technology, and medicine. Needham’s interest in China was piqued when three visiting Chinese scholars came to study with him in Cambridge, where he was a renowned embryologist. His life and work are explored in fascinating detail by Simon Winchester in The