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graduate students, and not subject to most college rules of decorum and celibacy.
    They first went to Great Cumbrae Island in the Clyde estuary, outside Glasgow. Soon after that came more ambitious journeys, paid for by grants for the pursuit of biochemical knowledge: the following years they went together to Monterey in California, to the Woods Hole Institute on the south coast of Massachusetts, and to a French marine laboratory in Brittany. Ostensibly they went away to work on matters embryological, and specifically to check on the varying pH of the nurtured fish eggs they found in each of these places. But in fact they spent much of their time talking about their shared interests in Christianity and socialism—and to judge from their rather saucy holiday snapshots, they had adequate time for erotic amusements, too.
    In early 1924 Needham introduced Dorothy to his mother in London, and they then visited her parents in the Devon village of Babbacombe. He proposed to her in midsummer, and they married in the autumn, just before the start of the academic year, choosing Friday, September 13, as the date for the small ceremony, in a deliberate snub to convention and superstition.
    Before the rites they had made it clear to each other and to their friends—though not to their parents—that theirs would be a thoroughly “modern” marriage. Whenever the need seized them they would pursue encounters with others. They would not be hobbled by the tedious, irksome, and thoroughly bourgeois demands of sexual fidelity.
    If they had had a child, all this might have changed. But they were not able to conceive: Joseph’s diary records encounters with Harley Street specialists concerned by his low sperm count, which may have been the reason. Still, they were philosophical about their situation. Having a child, they concluded much later, would have cramped their style—or at least his: from almost the very moment they exchanged vows Joseph began to pursue his erotic enthusiasms with great and unstinting gusto.
    Few Cambridge women of the time were left free from his attentions. Women who are now well on in years recall these attentions. They remember his wicked grin, his piercing gaze, his courtesy, his Old World charm, his offers of help and advice, and “his way of making you feel you are themost important person in the world to him—which of course at the time, you were.” One now elderly woman, Blanche Chidzey, vividly remembers meeting him on a train, talking briefly to him, and then falling asleep, only to awaken when she heard him chatting quietly to a distinguished physicist who was also in the compartment. “Naturally I thought some lofty scientific topic must have gripped them—but then I listened, and it was all about me, in terms of chatting me up.” But he was very polite, she added.

    Dorothy Moyle and Joseph Needham on their wedding day, Friday, September 13, 1924. Theirs was to be an “open marriage,” which lasted for more than six decades.
    Of Dorothy, who was a more discreet person—a perfect saint, said one admirer, who perhaps heaped praise on her for putting up so stoically with her extraordinary husband—we are not so sure. Joseph was to hint in later years that perhaps his wife was somewhat more sedate than he. She was, he said, “not a flamboyant character, but a reasonable person, never outrée or unusual.” Pictures from the time tend to confirm this: she is small and sober, bespectacled, with her hair tight around her head, her coat plain black, her shoes sensible, her smile a little forced; he is tall and slightly comic-looking in a baggy double-breasted suit and scuffed Oxfords, with a small badge in his lapel and a cigarette between his lips, his smile puckish and distant, his mind evidently on other things, far away.
    The fellows of Caius College did not give the young couple a wedding present. But in October of that year, they offered