ABSTRACT
Joseph Needham was a polymath trained in chemistry at Cambridge University, he, together with his wife, Dorothy Moyle Needham, developed major research in biochemistry at their alma mater. In 1948, Joseph Needham conceived a plan for a series of books, to be published by Cambridge University Press, on the history of science and technology in China, with background material on the intellectual and spiritual traditions that encompassed them. Near the end of his life, almost half a century after he had conceived Science and Civilisation in China, Needham listed some 250 Chinese technological inventions and a list of 35 transmitted from China to the West. The same confidence in strength of evidence from technology oriented his examinations of similarities between Chinese and Mesoamerican artifacts. Spanish conquerors systematically destroyed all these paper artifacts, labeling native books and images works of the devil.
