True Science
M.F. Perutz
- Advice to a Young Scientist by P.B. Medawar
Harper and Row, 109 pp, £4.95, February 1980, ISBN 0 06 337006 9
This is a guide book to the scientific scene, full of urbane wisdom, happy phrases and entertaining examples. ‘How can I tell if I am cut out to be a scientist?’ Medawar asks. He dismisses curiosity (it killed the cat) and suggests that scientists need something for which ‘exploratory impulsion’ is not too grand a name. But what about delight and wonder at the works of nature? Without these you might as well join Scotland Yard instead. What else draws people into science? It seems to me that, just as the Church did in former times, science offers a safe niche where you can spend a quiet life classifying spiders, away from what E.M. Forster called the world of telegrams and anger. To the ambitious poor, science offers a way to fame or reasonable wealth that needs no starting capital other than good brains and prodigious energy.
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