How can we redefine Joseph Needham’s sense of a world community for the 21st century?

In the middle of World War II, my father, Kenneth Lo, accompanied Joseph Needham on a lecture tour to Colchester Co-operative Society dedicated to the support of China’s war effort and to boycotting Japanese goods. They were comrades-in-arms, soft-left socialists, inspired by the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell and WH Auden alike to take up the pen and the campaign circuit. This article is a reflection on the politics and aesthetics of research, on decentring the Eurocentric narrative of the history of science, but also on the role of poetry in the quest for a better world. Grounded in socialist, Christian and 20th-century scientific utopian belief, All under Heaven was to be One Community. Post Needham, but in the Needham spirit, I ask what shared vision drives our research?