Peter Medawar

Sir Peter Medawar was a Brazilian-born English scientist best known for his work on how the immune system rejects or accepts organ transplants. He was co-winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet.

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• We cannot point to a single definitive solution of any one of the problems that confront us — political, economic, social or moral, that is, having to do with the conduct of life. We are still beginners, and for that reason may hope to improve. To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind. There is no need to be dismayed by the fact that we cannot yet envisage a definitive solution of our problems, a resting-place beyond which we need not try to go.
  • Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Exeter, 3 September 1969

• Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in. I suppose we all realize the degree to which fear and resentment of what is new is really a lament for the memories of our childhood.
  • Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Exeter, 3 September 1969

• There is no such thing as a Scientific Mind. Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common? Obligative scientists must be very rare, and most people who are in fact scientists could easily have been something else instead.
  • "Hypothesis and Imagination" (Times Literary Supplement, 25 Oct 1963)

• Simultaneous discovery is utterly commonplace, and it was only the rarity of scientists, not the inherent improbability of the phenomenon, that made it remarkable in the past. Scientists on the same road may be expected to arrive at the same destination, often not far apart.
  • Peter Medawar, "The Act of Creation" (New Statesman, 19 June 1964)

• A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries.
  • (with Jean Medawar), Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology (1985)

• Creosote has a pretty technological smell.
  • Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Exeter, 3 September 1969

• We shall not read it for its sociological insights, which are non-existent, nor as science fiction, because it has a general air of implausibility; but there is one high poetic fancy in the New Atlantis that stays in the mind after all its fancies and inventions have been forgotten. In the New Atlantis, an island kingdom lying in very distant seas, the only commodity of external trade is — light: Bacon's own special light, the light of understanding.
  • (on Francis Bacon's New Atlantis) Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Exeter, 3 September 1969

• We wring our hands over the miscarriages of technology and take its benefactions for granted. We are dismayed by air pollution but not proportionately cheered up by, say, the virtual abolition of poliomyelitis.
  • Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Exeter, 3 September 1969

• Scientists are entitled to be proud of their accomplishments, and what accomplishments can they call 'theirs' except the things they have done or thought of first? People who criticize scientists for wanting to enjoy the satisfaction of intellectual ownership are confusing possessiveness with pride of possession. Meanness, secretiveness and, sharp practice are as much despised by scientists as by other decent people in the world of ordinary everyday affairs; nor, in my experience, is generosity less common among them, or less highly esteemed.
  • "Lucky Jim" (New York Review of Books, 28 March 1968)

• But Watson had one towering advantage over all of them: in addition to being extremely clever he had something important to be clever about. This is an advantage which scientists enjoy over most other people engaged in intellectual pursuits, and they enjoy it at all levels of capability. To be a first-rate scientist it is not necessary (and certainly not sufficient) to be extremely clever, anyhow in a pyrotechnic sense. One of the great social revolutions brought about by scientific research has been the democratization of learning. Anyone who combines strong common sense with an ordinary degree of imaginativeness can become a creative scientist, and a happy one besides, in so far as happiness depends upon being able to develop to the limit of one's abilities.
  • "Lucky Jim" (New York Review of Books, 28 March 1968)

• Watson's childlike vision makes them seem like the creatures of a Wonderland, all at a strange contentious noisy tea-party which made room for him because for people like him, at this particular kind of party, there is always room.
  • "Lucky Jim" (New York Review of Books, 28 March 1968)

• Scientific discovery is a private event, and the delight that accompanies it, or the despair of finding it illusory, does not travel. One scientist may get great satisfaction from another’s work and admire it deeply; it may give him great intellectual pleasure; but it gives him no sense of participation in the discovery, it does not carry him away, and his appreciation of it does not depend on his being carried away. If it were otherwise the inspirational origin of scientific discovery would never have been in doubt.
  • ‘Hypothesis and Imagination’ in The Art of the Soluble, 1967.

• If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.
  • Review of Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation, in the New Statesman, 19 June 1964

• It is not envy or malice, as so many people think, but utter despair that has persuaded many educational reformers to recommend the abolition of the English public schools.
  • Introduction to The Art of the Soluble, 1967

• Yet the greater part of it, I shall show, is nonsense, tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself.
  • Review of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, Mind, 70, pp 99 to 105.

• In no sense other than an utterly trivial one is reproduction the inverse of chemical disintegration. It is a misunderstanding of genetics to suppose that reproduction is only 'intended' to make facsimiles, for parasexual processes of genetical exchange are to be found in the simplest living things.
  • Review of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, Mind, 70, pp 99 to 105.

• There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus.
  • Review of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, Mind, 70, pp 99 to 105.

• The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by accident (though there is a great deal of it) to have contributed anything of permanent value to the storehouse of human thought.
  • Review of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, Mind, 70, pp 99 to 105.

• I do not propose to criticize the fatuous argument I have just outlined; here, to expound is to expose.
  • Review of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, Mind, 70, pp 99 to 105.

• How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind, for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.
  • Review of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, Mind, 70, pp 99 to 105.

• French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.
  • Review of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, Mind, 70, pp 99 to 105.

• It would have been a great disappointment to me if Vibration did not somewhere make itself felt, for all scientistic mystics either vibrate in person or find themselves resonant with cosmic vibrations; but I am happy to say that on page 266 Teilhard will be found to do so.
  • Review of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, Mind, 70, pp 99 to 105.

• In spite of all the obstacles that Teilhard perhaps wisely puts in our way, it is possible to discern a train of thought in The Phenomenon of Man.
  • Review of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, Mind, 70, pp 99 to 105.

• To be creative, scientists need libraries and laboratories and the company of other scientists; certainly a quiet and untroubled life is a help. A scientist's work is in no way deepened or made more cogent by privation, anxiety, distress, or emotional harassment. To be sure, the private lives of scientists may be strangely and even comically mixed up, but not in ways that have any special bearing n the nature and quality of their work. If a scientist were to cut off an ear, no one would interpret such an action as evidence of an unhappy torment of creativity; nor will a scientist be excused any bizarrerie, however extravagant, on the grounds that he is a scientist, however brilliant.
  • Advice to a Young Scientist (1979)

• I believe in "intelligence," and I believe also that there are inherited differences in intellectual ability, but I do not believe that intelligence is a simple scalar endowment that can be quanitified by attaching a single figure to it—an I.Q. or the like.
  • Advice to a Young Scientist (1979), p.25, quoting his own article "Unnatural science", New York Review of Books 24 (Feb 3, 1977), p.13–18

• I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him unintelligent. He was annoyed, and it did not appease him when I went on to ask how he came to attach such a clear meaning to the notion of lack of intelligence. We never spoke again.
  • Advice to a Young Scientist (1979), p.25, footnote to previous quotation.

• The attempt to discover and promulgate the truth is nevertheless an obligation upon all scientists, one that must be persevered in no matter what the rebuffs—for otherwise what is the point in being a scientist?
  • Aristotle to Zoos, 1983

• The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature.
  • Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought, 1969

• The similarity between them is not the taxonomic key to some other, deeper, affinity, and our recognizing its existence marks the end, not the inauguration, of a train of thought.
  • In ‘Herbert Spencer and the Law of General Evolution’. Spencer Lecture, Oxford, 1963: reprinted in Medawar, P. B. (1967). The Art of the Soluble. Methuen, London. Pp 37-58.

• The bells which toll for mankind are—most of them, anyway—like the bells of Alpine cattle; they are attached to our own necks, and it must be our fault if they do not make a cheerful and harmonious sound.
  • The Future of Man, 1959

• It is the great glory as well as the great threat of science that everything which is in principle possible can be done if the intention to do it is sufficiently resolute.
  • The Threat and the Glory, 1977

• Observation is the generative act in scientific discovery. For all its aberrations, the evidence of the senses is essentially to be relied upon--provided we observe nature as a child does, without prejudices and preconceptions, but with that clear and candid vision which adults lose and scientists must strive to regain.
  • Medawar, Peter (1982). Pluto's Republic, p. 99. Oxford: Oxford University Press.