Biographer Recaps U.K. Scientist’s Fascination With China

RAY SUAREZ:

What makes China China? That was the focus, the obsession of one Joseph Needham.

He was a Cambridge University biochemist whose life took a dramatic turn in 1937. That's when he fell in love with a visiting Chinese student. It was an affair tolerated by his wife and sparked a lifelong fascination with China.

In particular, he wanted to know why China, where so many advances in science and technology had originated, had been eclipsed by the West. He began his extensive travels in war-torn China in 1943. And by the time of his death in 1995, he was recognized as one of the world's pre-eminent China scholars. His legacy was the monumental, 24-volume "Science and Civilization in China."

Joseph Needham is the subject of a new book by Simon Winchester, "The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of an Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom."

And, Simon Winchester, maybe this is a perfect time to be having this conversation, because, once again, we're trying to open China and understand it, aren't we?

SIMON WINCHESTER, Author, "The Man Who Loved China": I think it is appropriate that we start focusing on what it is, as you said in your introduction, that makes China China.

And this majestic, monumental series of books really does, in its essence, bring out that. It's an extraordinary work. And I'm thrilled that I found this man, this man who's very little known in the West, but every Chinese person whose Chinese name is Li Yuese — and if you say "Li Yuese" to any Chinese schoolchild, he'd say, "That's the greatest Englishman ever to have lived in China."