Peter Medawar > Quotes

“The alternative to thinking in evolutionary terms is not to think at all.”
― P.B. Medawar

“The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.”
― P.B. 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

“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 B. Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist

“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?”
― 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 processes of continuous control, namely feedback, the control of performance by the consequences of the act performed. In the hypothetico-deductive scheme the inferences we draw from a hypothesis are, in a sense, its logical output. If they are true, the hypothesis need not be altered, but correction is obligatory if they are false. The continuous feedback from inference to hypothesis is implicit in Whewell's account of scientific method; he would not have dissented from the view that scientific behaviour can be classified as appropriately under cybernetics as under logic.”
― Peter B. Medawar, Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought: Memoirs, American Philosophical Society

“There is no quicker way for a scientist to bring discredit upon himself and on his profession than roundly to declare — particularly when no declaration of any kind is called for — that science knows or soon will know the answers to all questions worth asking, and that the questions that do not admit a scientific answer are in some way non-questions or pseudo-questions that only simpletons ask and only the gullible profess to be able to answer.”
― 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 of bookkeeping.”
― Peter B. Medawar, The Strange Case Of The Spotted Mice: And Other Classic Essays on Science

“There is no certain way of telling in advance if the day- dreams of a life dedicated to the pursuit of truth will carry a novice through the frustration of seeing experiments fail and of making the dismaying discovery that some of one's favorite ideas are groundless.”
― Peter Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist

“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 unwittingly, like the chap in Molière who found that all his life, unknowingly, he had been speaking prose.”
― Peter B. Medawar, Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought: Memoirs, American Philosophical Society

“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 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.”
― Peter B. Medawar

“For these reasons a young scientist must not be disheartened if he does not become the eponym of a natural principle phenomenon or disease. Although the importance of discoveries maybe overrated no young scientists need think that he will gain a reputation or high performant merely by compiling information particularly information of the kind nobody really wants. But if he makes the world more easily understandable by any means whether theoretical or experimental he will learn his colleagues gratitude and respect.”
― Peter Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist

“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.”
― Peter Medawar

“Is common failing ... To fall in love with a hypothesis and to be unwilling to take no for an answer. A Love affair with a pet hypothesis can waste years of precious time. There is very often no finally decisive yes, though quite often there can be a decisive no.”
― Peter Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist

“People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief. – Peter Medawar”
― Peter Medawar

“It is not methodologically an exaggeration to say that Fleming eventually found penicillin because he has been looking for it... Good luck is almost always preceded by an expectation that it will gratify. Pasteur is well known to have said that fortune favors the prepared mind, and Fontenelle observed, 'Ces hasards ne sont que pour ceux qui jouent bien !”
― Peter Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist

“I am often asked, 'What made you become a scientist?' But I can't stand far enough away from myself to give a really satisfactory answer, for I cannot distinctly remember a time when I did not think that a scientist was the most exciting possible thing to be.”
― Peter Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist

“The lives of scientists, considered as Lives, almost always make dull reading. For one thing, the careers of the famous and the merely ordinary fall into much the same pattern, give or take an honorary degree or two, or (in European countries) an honorific order. It could be hardly otherwise. Academics can only seldom lead lives that are spacious or exciting in a worldly sense. They need laboratories or libraries and the company of other academics. Their work is in no way made deeper or more cogent by privation, distress or worldly buffetings. Their private lives may be unhappy, strangely mixed up or comic, but not in ways that tell us anything special about the nature or direction of their work. Academics lie outside the devastation area of the literary convention according to which the lives of artists and men of letters are intrinsically interesting, a source of cultural insight in themselves. If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility; if a historian were to fail (as Ruskin did) to consummate his marriage, we should not suppose that our understanding of historical scholarship had somehow been enriched.”
― Peter B. Medawar

“In choosing topics for research and departments to enlist in, a young scientist must beware of following fashion. It is one thing to fall into step with a great concerted movement of thought such as molecular genetics or cellular immunology, but quite another merely to fall in with prevailing fashion for, say, some new histochemical procedure or technical gimmick.”
― Peter Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist

“...today, a young hopeful attaches himself as a graduate student to some senior scientist and hopes to learn his trade and be rewarded by a master's degree or doctorate of philosophy bad evidence that he has done so.”
― Peter Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist

“Yet an understanding of the scientific enterprise, as distinct from the data and concepts and theories of science itself, is certainly within the grasp of us all. It is, after all, an enterprise conducted by men and women who might be our neighbors, going to and from their workplaces day by day, stimulated by hopes and purposes that are common to all of us, rewarded as most of us are by occasional successes and distressed by occasional setbacks. It is an enterprise with its own rules and customs, but an understanding of that enterprise is accessible to any of us, for it is quintessentially human. And an understanding of the enterprise inevitably brings with it some insight into the nature of its products.”
― Peter Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist

“Kültür konusunda kendini küçümsenmiş ve yetersiz hisseden bir bilimci, klasik edebiyat ve güzel sanatlar dünyasından tamamen uzaklaşarak teselli bulur. İncinmiş bir ruh için başka bir deva da 'çokbilmiş' olmaktır. Bu durumda çevresindekiler, o günlerin gözde senaryoları, yorumları, Gödel teoremi, Chomsky'nin dilbilimi kavramı, güzel sanatlarda Rosicrucian'cı etkiler konularındaki göz kamaştırıcı konuşmaları karşısında şaşkına dönecektir. Bu, gerçekten korkunç bir intikam; ancak, eski dostlarının onu görünce kaçışmaları ile sonuçlanır. Çokbilmiş konuşma biçiminde en sık olarak kullanılan şudur: "x diye bir şey yoktur; herkesin x dediği şey gerçekte y dir." Burada x, insanların inandığı herhangi bir şey olabilir; örneğin Rönesans, romantizmin yeniden canlanışı veya sanayi devrimi; y ise işçi sınıfının gönlünde yattığı söylenen en önemli şey. Yine de çokbilmişlik bilimcilerin meslek hastalıklarından sayılmaz. Benim tanıdığım en kötü çok bilmişlerin ikisi de ekonomistti.”
― Peter Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist

“The number and complexity of the techniques and supporting disciplines used in research are so large that a novice may easily be frightened into postponing research in order to carry on with the process of 'equipping himself'. As there is no knowing in advance where a research enterprise may lead and what kind of skills it will require as it unfolds, this process of 'equipping oneself' has no predeterminable limits and is bad psychological policy, anyway; we always need to know and understand a great deal more than we do already and to master many more skills than we now possess.”
― Peter Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist

“Bilim açısından sakıncalı bir başka görüş de, astlarına emirler verip onların etrafta koşuşturarak emirleri yerine getirmelerinin bilimsel araştırma yapmak olduğu sanısıdır.”
― Peter Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist

“No, the problem ( necessary to achieve important scientific discoveries) must be such that it matters what the answer is- whether to science generally or to mankind.”
― Peter Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist

“A young scientist has now now a metre or so of bench space let us say a white coat authority to use the library and the problem that he has thought up himself or that a senior has asked him to look into.”
― Peter Medawar

“It is psychologically most important to get results, even if they are not original. Getting results, even by repeating another's work, brings with its great accession of self-confidence: the young scientist feels himself one of the club at last, can chip in at seminars and at scientific meetings with "My own experience was..." Or "I got exactly the same results" or "I'd be inclined to agree that for this particular purpose medium 94 is definitely better than 93", and then can sit down again, tremulous but secretly exultant.”
― Peter Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist

“That there is indeed a limit upon science is made very likely by the existence of questions that science cannot answer and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer… It is not to science, therefore but to metaphysics, imaginative literature or religion that we must turn for answers to questions having to do with first and last things.”
― Peter Medawar, The Limits of Science

“Bilimsel araştırma, sonuçları açıklanmadan önce bitmiş sayılmaz.”
― Peter Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist

“Whichever form of revenge a scientist decides upon, whether to withdraw from cultural interests or to dazzle his fellow men with omniscience, he should certainly ask himself, “Whom am I punishing?”
― Peter Medawar, Advice To A Young Scientist