Peter Medawar

Peter Medawar is currently working on cancer researchfor the Medical Research Council. He won theNobel prize for Medicine in 1960. His Advice to a Young Scientist will be published next spring.

Abortion, Alienation, Anomie

Peter Medawar, 2 December 1982

I have reason to believe that the Harvard University Press has it in mind to revive the literary genre of which the exemplar is Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique – a bright idea, for Voltaire’s Dictionary is still read with delight by those who have come to think the better-known Candide intolerably tiresome.

Florey Story

Peter Medawar, 20 December 1979

Howard Walter Florey was a great man and nomistake. He devoted the more important partof his professional life to a single wholly admirable purpose which he pursued until he achieved it, showing, in spite of many setbacks and rebuffs, the magnanimity that is the minimal entry qualification for being considered ‘great’. In a memorialaddress, Patrick Blackett likened Florey’s achievement to that of Jenner, Pasteur and Lister: but the public were so little aware of him that when Macfarlane first approached publishers with the notion of a biography, they wondered if he would not do better to write on Alexander Fleming instead. This, Macfarlane surmises, was because the public had already cast Fleming as the hero of the great penicillin story: he was a closer approximation than Howard Florey to the public’s stereotype of a great scientist, for, although a great scientist, Florey was the kind of man who would have been a success at anything he had chosen to turn his hand to. Macfarlane thinks the comparison of Florey with Jenner, Pasteur and Lister is specially aptbecause ‘the work of these three men forms a logical sequence with his own that spans, in the course of about 150 years, the gulf between almost totaltherapeutic helplessness and the virtual defeat of most of the important bacterialdiseases.’ Whatever the general public may have thought about him, Florey stood unsurpassably high in the estimation of his colleagues – that which meansmost to a scientist – and in due course they elected him head of their profession in England as President of the Royal Society.

Medawar’s Knack

N.W. Pirie, 27 September 1990

Jean Taylor met Peter Medawar when they were students. When she married him she therefore knew that he was an extremely able biologist, but she cannot have foreseen what an energetic polymath she...

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Medawartime

June Goodfield, 6 November 1986

My first encounter with Peter Medawar revealed something about us both. When he was the new Mason Professor of Zoology in the University of Birmingham I was a student at University College,...

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Science and the Stars

M.F. Perutz, 6 June 1985

Medawar presents an erudite and entertaining account of the limits of science, or mostly the lack of them, as perceived by great thinkers from Francis Bacon to Karl Popper and himself. His...

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Unmaking mysteries

Mark Ridley, 1 September 1983

Sir Peter Medawar is the most distinguished biologist in Britain today. His work on immunology during the 1950s is the inspiration of all modern transplantation surgery, and was judged worthy of...

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True Science

M.F. Perutz, 19 March 1981

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...

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