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“... help, counsel and advise his patients. Now the American consumer appears to have rumbled what Sir Peter Medawar has termed the most stupendous confidence-trick of the 20th century. To be sure, the numbers of mentally sick and worried well have not diminished. They are still in search of help, but they are turning more and more to drugs, to ...”

“... speaking which would offer an advance. There is no sign that this is likely to happen. True, Sir Peter Medawar effected a brief release when challenging his field’s version of the nature-nurture antithesis with the instance of innate potentialities never to be actualised unless the environment were right. But feud is collusive, and the parties usually ...”

“... of academic life in general, but one can guess at more particular reasons. Not long ago Sir Peter Medawar remarked that when the momentous DNA discoveries were being made there were plenty of people in the English faculties of universities quite as clever as Crick and Watson – but Crick and Watson had something to be clever about. For the last ...”

“... Gould, the American evolutionary biologist, writes essays that are a delight to read. The late Sir Peter Medawar was a consummate stylist. But these few names aside, where, one asks oneself, are the modern equivalents of the great scientists whose books Professor Maynard Smith read so avidly as a ...”

“... unfortunate and now long-dead woman, from whose name HeLa is derived.* So why do we age? In 1952, Peter Medawar pointed out that until the middle of the 18th century most of our ancestors would have died from infections or injuries long before they were old enough to experience the effects of ageing. Genes that produced harmful effects late in life would ...”

“... novel Scar Tissue along with developments in evolutionary theory that affect old age. Peter Medawar argued that the effect of natural selection grows weaker with time, and that old age is ‘in effect a biological dumping ground’ – a ‘genetic dustbin’. But this will no longer do; interest has now settled on the phenomenon of the ...”

“... AJPT and Lewis, but Bruce McFarlane, John Morris, Rupert Cross, Cyril Darlington, J.Z. Young, Sir Peter Medawar, Gilbert Ryle ... the line stretched on. No doubt it was all more humdrum in reality, but one was left with the impression of great intellectual giants inhabiting a world of mad English eccentricity: an older world of indulgence, scandal, fun ...”

“... work, and strong aversion to speculation beyond what is justified by the experimental results’. Peter Medawar once extolled imaginative guesswork as part of the scientific process. Perutz comments: ‘During the first 33 years of my own research imaginative guesswork proved useless: only after my colleagues and I had solved the structure of haemoglobin ...”

“... it. The Modern American Novel is an ‘Opus Book’ (General Editors – Keith Thomas, Alan Ryan, Peter Medawar) intended for students. The Literature of the United States is a volume in the Macmillan History of Literature. But no Oxford undergraduate could get by with generalities like this aperçu of Professor Walker’s: ‘Jewish novels are ...”

“... later, even undergraduates were no longer much interested in evolutionary problems. The late Sir Peter Medawar spoke for the up-to-date zoology undergraduate of the Thirties when confronted with Edwin Goodrich, professor of zoology at Oxford, and the greatest British vertebrate anatomist of his time: Goodrich was a rather selfish little man ... in ...”

“... closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens. Peter Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher and diver who has been studying octopuses and other cephalopods in the wild, mostly off the coast of his native Sydney, for years. The alienness of octopuses, in his view, provides an opportunity to reflect on the nature of ...”

“... or a ‘challenge’. Old age holds out promises as well as threats. Many are living to enjoy what Peter Laslett has termed the Third Age: a period of health, often lasting as long as childhood and adolescence together, free from the anxieties of child-care and the pressures of work. Out of such elders, remote from the stereotypes of decrepitude, may come a ...”