[4] Needham's father, Joseph, was a doctor, and his mother, Alicia Adelaïde, née Montgomery (1863–1945), was a music composer from Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland.

His 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.

In his early teens, he was taken to hear the Sunday lectures of Ernest Barnes, a professional mathematician who became Master of the Temple, a royal church in London.

He 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 Needham a grounding in engineering.

Sanderson also emphasised to the boys of the school that co-operation led to higher human achievement than competition and that knowledge of history was necessary to build a better future.

During school holidays, Needham assisted his father in the operating rooms of several wartime hospitals, an experience that convinced him that he was not interested in becoming a surgeon.

After graduation, Needham was elected to a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College and worked in Gowland Hopkins' laboratory at the University Department of Biochemistry, specialising in embryology and morphogenesis.

Including this history reflected Needham's fear that overspecialization would hold back scientific progress and that social and historical forces shaped science.

At that time Cambridge school of biochemistry were recognised for imaginative exploratory science and had outstanding scientists Hopkins, Dorothy M. Needham (later his wife)Robin Hill, Barcroft who were joined by Rudi Lemberg on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship.

[8] In 1939 he produced a massive work on morphogenesis that a Harvard reviewer claimed "will go down in the history of science as Joseph Needham's magnum opus," little knowing what would come later.

And goes on to acknowledge Holorenshaw in pointing out: "that no less than the men of property, the Levellers realised the social importance of science, and foresaw the part it would one day play in human welfare."

During this time he made several long journeys through war-torn China and many smaller ones, visiting scientific and educational establishments and obtaining for them much needed supplies.

[13] The other long trip reached Fuzhou on the east coast, returning across the Xiang River just two days before the Japanese blew up the bridge at Hengyang and cut off that part of China.

After two years in which the suspicions of the Americans over scientific co-operation with communists intensified, Needham resigned in 1948 and returned to Gonville and Caius College, where he resumed his fellowship and his rooms, which were soon filled with his books.

These included cast iron, the ploughshare, the stirrup, gunpowder, printing, the magnetic compass and clockwork escapements, most of which were thought at the time to be western inventions.

[17] Needham and Huxley advocated the growth of scientific education as a means to overcome political conflict and hence founded UNESCO in an effort to expand its influence.

In Needham's words, "Why did modern science, the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only in the West at the time of Galileo?

[20][21] Francis Bacon considered four inventions as completely transforming the modern world, marking it off from the antiquity of the Middle Ages: paper and printing, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass.

In the final volume he suggests "A continuing general and scientific progress manifested itself in traditional Chinese society but this was violently overtaken by the exponential growth of modern science after the Renaissance in Europe.

"The ingenuity and inventiveness of the Chinese would no doubt have enriched China further and probably brought it to the threshold of modern industry, had it not been for this stifling state control.

Progress from experimentation following the logic of a scientific method can occur at a much faster rate because the inventor can perform many trials during the same production period under a controlled environment.

As Lin (1995) puts forward, initially, the culture of the Chinese has valued the males in the society; as a result, early marriages were experienced which boosted the fertility rates leading to the rapid increase in the China population.

[30] In another vein of criticism, Andre Gunder Frank's Re-Orient argues that despite Needham's contributions in the field of Chinese technological history, he still struggled to break free from his preconceived notions of European exceptionalism.

As Needham found more and more evidence about science and technology in China, he struggled to liberate himself from his Eurocentric original sin, which he had inherited directly from Marx, as Cohen also observes.

The mainstream school of thinking of the bureaucratic Chinese elite, or 'Confucianism' (another problematic term) in his vocabulary, seemed to him to be less interested in science and technology, and to have 'turned its face away from Nature.'

Ironically, the dynasty that apparently turned away from printing from 706 till its demise in 907 was as Taoist as any in Chinese history, though perhaps its 'state Taoism' would have seemed a corrupt and inauthentic business to Needham.

[34] Justin Lin argues against Needham's premise that China's early adoption of modern socioeconomic institutions contributed heavily to its technological advancement.

Zhou Enlai coordinated an international campaign to enlist Needham for a study commission, tacitly offering access to materials and contacts in China needed for his then early research.

Needham agreed to be an inspector in North Korea and his report supported the allegations (it is debated to this very day whether the evidence had been planted as a part of a complicated disinformation campaign).