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Peter Medawar Quotes (1915-1987)
Scientist
About Peter Medawar
Sir Peter Medawar (February 28, 1915 β October 2, 1987) 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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βCreosote has a pretty technological smell.β
βThe human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.β
βIt is written in an all but totally unintelligible style, and this is construed as prima-facie evidence of profundity.β
βKarl Popperβs conception of the scientific process is that is realistic β it gives a pretty fair picture of what goes on in real life laboratories.β
βThere is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus.β
βIn 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.β
βIt 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.β
βIt 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.β
βA 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.β
βThe 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.β
βWe 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.β
βThe attempt to discover and promulgate the truth is nevertheless an obligation upon all scientists, one that must be persevered in no matter what the rebuffsβfor otherwise what is the point in being a scientist?β
βIf a person a) is poorly, b) receives treatment intended to make him better, and c) gets better, no power of reasoning known to medical science can convince him that it may not have been the treatment that restored his health.β
βWatson'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.β
βWhen asked to make the formal declaration that I did not intend to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, I was fool enough to reply that I had no such purpose, but that were I to do it by mistake I should be inexpressibly contrite.β
βToday 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.β
βOnly human beings guide their behaviour by a knowledge of what happened before they were born and a preconception of what may happen after they are dead; thus only humans find their way by a light that illuminates more than the patch of ground they stand on.β
βI 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 itβan I.Q. or the like.β
βYet 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.β
βFrench 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.β
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Peter Medawar on Intelligence 2 quotes
βI 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 quantified by attaching a single figure to itβan I.Q. or the like.β
Peter Medawar on Science 2 quotes
βThe 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.β
Peter Medawar on Biology
βFor a biologist the alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.β
Peter Medawar on Scientists
βA 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.β
What Peter Medawar Said About Others
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Peter Medawar on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 2 quotes
βYet 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.β
Peter Medawar on Thomas Hobbes
βThomas Hobbes has always been thought of as the arch materialist, the first man to uphold go-getting as a creed. But that is a travesty of Hobbes's opinion. He was a go-getter in a sense, but it was the going, not the getting he extolled. The race had no finishing post as Hobbes conceived it. The great thing about the race was to be in it, to be a contestant in the attempt to make the world a better place, and it was a spiritual death he had in mind when he said that to forsake the course is to die.Β 'There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here,'Β he told us inΒ Leviathan,Β 'because life itself is but a motion and can never be without desire, or without fear, no more than without sense';Β 'there can be no contentment but in proceeding.'Β I agree.β
About Peter Medawar
Sir Peter Medawar (February 28, 1915 β October 2, 1987) 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.