Peter Medawar possessed more friends, all round the world, than anyone I’ve ever known or heard of. Possessed is the word: they hung on his words, read with close attention and vast pleasure everything he wrote, rejoiced in his achievements, worried endlessly about his health, wondered at his knack for survival and his outright defiance of all the rules of neurology, and adored him. Fifty, a hundred years from now, Medawar will be a steady source of Ph.D. theses for graduate students from any number of disciplines—biology and immunology, of course, since he and his colleagues opened up the fields cleared by Ehrlich, Bordet and Landsteiner in earlier generations, revealing in a stroke of classical Medawar experimentation the new and entrancing depths lying just below. I can already imagine the doctoral dissertations: the tolerance of mice, the tolerance of twin cows, something less than tolerance of psychoanalysis, outright immunologic rejection ...
In Memoriam Peter Medawar
Editor's note: On October 2, 1987, the British immunologist Sir Peter Medawar died at a London hospital following a stroke. Among other achievements, Sir Peter shared the 1960 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine with Sir Macfarlane Burnet for their joint work on the theory of acquired immunological tolerance. The work led to tremendous advances in liver, heart and kidney transplants. He was also a noted author and philosopher of science (see THE SCIENTIST, November 17, 1986, p. 23, for a re
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