Bulletin Number Five 1983

greatly helped i f there have been secondary sources written in Chinese already. Only just now I got a reference to a new book on the history o f botany. That would be very useful indeed. I wish it had existed when we did our work on the history o f botany. On the other hand, you get other subjects where there isn't any book at all. For instance, if you want to know about the history o f mycology (i.e. fungi, toadstools, mush­ rooms, cryptogams o f all kinds) there is no book that I know of, although there was such a lo t done on fungi in Chinese history. Another thing that has never been done is the history o f fire­ works. That would be a very interesting thing too. There are goodm ilitary histories, but not anything on civilian gunpowder, and particularly on the civil engineering aspect, i.e. the use o f gunpowder in mining, quarrying, blasting and so on, which is just as important as the m ilitary uses. There have never been monographs on these, so you have to dig it out in the hard way. Another entirely different type o f problem is: how you are going to get the support required. I think you can say the only reason why we have been able to do what we have done is because Cambridge has a tradition o f allowing a great deal o f freedom to individual researchers. It was fortunate that the Biochemical Laboratory in Cambridge had a very large staff, so the fact that I would be working on the history o f science in China didn't have such disastrous consequences. There are universities in the world, you know, which recognize a person's change o f interest. Take the case in Manchester for instance. Michael Polanyi was Professor o f Physical Chemistry, but he started to take an interest in sociology and finally lost all interest in physical chemistry. In due course, they changed over his Chair and made him Professor o f Sociology and relieved him from being Professor o f Physical Chemistry. But in Cambridge they would never do that. I f you are a Reader in Biochemistry (I was Sir William Dunn Reader in Biochemistry), you can go on un til you retire. They'd never change it but they don't mind much what you do. Q. Do you have difficulties in finding collaborators? A. Yes, that is a very d ifficu lt job. In order to co­ operate in a work like ours ， somebody has got to have, first o f all, knowledge o f one or another science, practical if possible. He or she has to be interested also in the history o f science, and the philosophy o f science, maybe. And then thirdly he has to have classical Chinese, or else it's no good for he can't get at the texts. He has got to be able to write good English. That's another thing. And all these requirements, and maybe others as well, are not often found in the same person. Q. Are most o f the collaborators Chinese? A. No, I wouldn't say that. About half and half, but many are. You could take two typical examples. Lo Jung-pang ( 羅榮邦 ) is dead now. He was Professor o f History at the University o f Cali­ fornia at Davis, and he wrote a very good draft, which we still haven't printed, on the salt industry and deep borehole drilling, which is a Chinese invention. The Chinese have been bringing up salt from underground waters through these deep boreholes, and today all the oil-wells are based on the deep borehole drilling technique. And then another person that I might mention is Donald Wagner. He is a Dane. He is redoing our iron and steel monograph, and the history o f iron and steel in China. He is very good and has taken up courses at the Iron and Steel Institute in Copenhagen, and at the same time following the development o f raw iron and cast iron and steel in Chinese culture. So one is aWesterner and the other is a Chinese, you see. We always say it would be impossible to do all this kind o f work w ithout the collaboration o f Chinese and Westerners because no Westerner and no Chinese alone can have the breadth o f knowledge which is really required. Q. I understand that you have a strong conviction that science is a part o f the highest civilization ， how do you view the anti-scientific movement in the West, particularly in highly industrialized countries? A. Well, I think that's quite natural. Here again Con­ fucianism might be important because it might put some kind o f ethical stamp on science. You see the trouble w ith modem science, as it developed from Galileo's time onwards, is that it threw out ethics; ethics was irrelevant in the same way as theology was irrelevant. The scientific form o f experience was isolated and you pursued it single- heartedly. That's all very well; but i f you throw out ethics, it leads to the most terrible situations, like that which we are in today, where the danger o f nuclear destruction is hanging over everybody. It's not really much good for scientists to say: this doesn't concern us; this is simply the evil uses to which certain people put our work. That might be a reasonable excuse. But I think almost 24 ACADEMIC/CULTURAL EVENTS