Contributions to the knowledge of growth, ageing and especially the biology of tissue leading to successful organ and tissue transplantation earned British zoologist Sir
Peter Medawar, along with Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, the 1960 Nobel Prize in Science.
Answer: First, I identify completely with Nobel Laureate Sir
Peter Medawar who showed that "ultimate questions are beyond the explanatory competence of science", and demonstrated "the existence of questions that science cannot answer and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer".
In the novel's opening pages Henry, spooked by the burning plane, recalls with alarm the British political scientist Fred Halliday's prediction (Saturday has numerous references to real people, so light-handedly done that the novel gains a type of fictional fourth dimension) that 9/11 began a world crisis that would "take a hundred years to resolve." Later, driving his new Mercedes, feeling confident and prosperous, Henry remembers a statement by the famous British immunologist,
Peter Medawar, who also happened to be of Arab descent: "To deride the hopes of progress is the ultimate fatuity." Halliday's lugubrious forecast is nonsense, Henry reassures himself.
The Nobel laureate,
Peter Medawar, described a virus as 'a piece of nucleic acid surrounded by bad news'.
The start of the modern era of transplantation has been attributed to Sir
Peter Medawar's paper on allogeneic skin grafts in rabbits (1944-46).
As Nobel laureate physiologist
Peter Medawar (1979) has said:
does not say that all are equal, but they all share many features, and each has its own positive contribution to make to our understanding "the Big Picture." One personal disappointment was finding Teilhard de Chardin summarily reduced to unimportance by quoting one of his most hostile and implacable critics,
Peter Medawar.
According to an evolutionary theory of aging proposed by English biologist
Peter Medawar and others, in young animals, the force of natural selection favors good genes and acts against bad genes.
Watson and Crick opened floodgates to what has been, by any standards a spectacular intellectual revolution - even if
Peter Medawar was going too far when he wrote, in his review of Watson's The Double Helix: "It is simply not worth arguing with anyone so obtuse as not to realise that this complex of discoveries is the greatest achievement of science in the twentieth century." My misgiving about this engagingly calculated piece of arrogance is that I'd have a hard time defending it against a rival claim for, say, quantum theory or relativity.
Otherwise, you're just recycling what was given to you." His intellectual heroes are such towering scholars as
Peter Medawar and Isaiah Berlin, to whom he dedicated An Urchin in a Storm.
Peter Medawar, who won a Nobel Prize for his research on the immune system, writes that "nearly all scientific research leads nowhere - or, if it does lead somewhere, then not in the direction it started off with....
13 Sir Francis Bacon as cited by Sir
Peter Medawar, Pluto's Republic, Oxford University Press, Oxford (1983), pp.34-35.