There are certain extraordinary people whose lives are by no means pre-ordained. Joseph Needham was one such person. One of the world's leading biochemists, he would go on to become a renowned China scholar. Needham was a product of the Cambridge of the 1930s, a sexually tolerant, socially progressive world that was happy to accommodate his academic shifts, studied eccentricity and leftwing activism.
Needham enjoyed a privileged life there, a degree of license inconceivable to the average British person in an age when it was still possible in some circles to cause outrage by voicing support for Darwinian theories. If you were sufficiently brilliant at what you did, though, it was possible to be both a scholar and Bohemian at Cambridge without ruffling too many of its gerontocracy's feathers. An advocate of sexual liberation, he would enjoy an "open marriage" with his equally tolerant partner, while simultaneously maintaining a Chinese mistress and a number of other dalliances.
In 1954, the bespectacled and owlish Needham would publish the first volume of his masterpiece "Science and Civilization in China," a work regarded as the foremost explication of China ever produced. The transition from biochemist to celebrated Sinologist did not happen overnight, but at a pace that will leave the reader of Simon Winchester's account reeling.