Quotes by Peter Medawar

About Peter Medawar:

Sir Peter Brian Medawar is regarded as the "father of transplantation". He is remembered for his wit in real life and popular writings. Famous zoologists such as Richard Dawkins, referred to him as "the wittiest of all scientific writers", and Stephen Jay Gould, as "the cleverest man I have ever known".
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not.

Peter Medawar

I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.

Peter Medawar

The fact that scientists do not consciously practice a formal methodology is very poor evidence that no such methodology exists. It could be said—has been said—that there is a distinctive methodology of science which scientists practice unwitting...

Peter Medawar

There is nothing distinctively scientific about the hypothetico-deductive process. It is not even distinctively intellectual. It is merely a scientific context for a much more general stratagem that underlies almost all regulative processes or proces...

Peter Medawar

For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very precisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot ...

Peter Medawar

The spread of secondary and latterly of 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.

Peter Medawar

The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.

Peter Medawar

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 [pseudoscience/'woo'], for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by ...

Peter Medawar

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.

Peter Medawar

Author Bio

  • NamePeter Medawar
  • DescriptionScientist
  • BornFebruary 28, 1915
  • DiedOctober 2, 1987
  • CountryUnited Kingdom; Brazil
  • ProfessionPhysician; Immunologist; Zoologist; Autobiographer
  • AwardsFellow Of The Royal Society; Nobel Prize In Physiology Or Medicine; Commander Of The Order Of The British Empire; Copley Medal; Royal Medal; Kalinga Prize