Joseph Needham, 94; Cambridge Scholar

Joseph Needham, the Cambridge don who spent his life examining how the Chinese became scientists 1,000 years before the Renaissance, has died, it was reported Saturday.

Needham died Friday, said the Rev. John Sturdy, dean of Gonville and Caius, the Cambridge University college with which Needham was associated for 70 years. He was 94.

Famed for the breadth of his knowledge and his contradictory pursuits, Needham has been described as one of the outstanding English scholars of his age and a supreme example of the English eccentric.

He was both a devout Anglican and a Marxist and admirer of Mao Tse-tung.

He trained as an embryologist and his 1934 “History of Embryology” has been described as the standard work on the subject.

Needham became interested in China in the late 1930s under the influence of scientist Gwei-Djen Lu, a student of his first wife, eminent biochemist Dr. Dorothy Needham, to whom he was married for 63 years.

His epic 15-volume work, “Science and Civilization in China” became a landmark work and took 40 years of his life.

One reviewer described the work as “perhaps the greatest single act of historical synthesis and intercultural communication ever attempted by one man.”

Needham’s driving ambition was to explore why China--home of inventions including the clock, gunpowder, printing and the mariner’s compass--did not enjoy a scientific revolution and become a fully fledged world power.

His opus covered subjects ranging from history, philosophy and astronomy to clocks, acupuncture and navigation.

It helped earn him China’s Order of the Brilliant Star in 1990.