Peter Medawar: Doing

Peter Medawar was scientist. Explore interesting quotes on doing.
Peter Medawar: 80   quotes 0   likes

“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? Obligative scientists must be very rare, and most people who are in fact scientists could easily have been something else instead.”

Peter Medawar

"Hypothesis and Imagination" (Times Literary Supplement, 25 Oct 1963)
1960s

People , Way

“It would have been a great disappointment to me if Vibration did not somewhere make itself felt, for all scientistic mystics either vibrate in person or find themselves resonant with cosmic vibrations; but I am happy to say that on page 266 Teilhard will be found to do so.”

Peter Medawar

1960s, Review of Teilhard de Chardin's "The Phenomenon of Man", 1961

Disappointment , Personality , Happiness

“I 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 it—an I. Q. or the like.”

Peter Medawar

1970s, Advice to a Young Scientist (1979)

Intelligence

“We cannot point to a single definitive solution of any one of the problems that confront us — political, economic, social or moral, that is, having to do with the conduct of life. We are still beginners, and for that reason may hope to improve. To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind. There is no need to be dismayed by the fact that we cannot yet envisage a definitive solution of our problems, a resting-place beyond which we need not try to go.”

Peter Medawar

1960s, Presidential Address, 1969

Life , Hope , Problem

“When 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.”

Peter Medawar

Source: 1980s, P. B. Medawar (1986), Memoir of a thinking radish: an autobiography, Oxford University Press, p. 117.

Fools

“I do not believe—indeed, I deem it a comic blunder to believe—that the exercise of reason is sufficient to explain our condition and where necessary to remedy it, but I do believe that the exercise of reason is at all times necessary…”

Peter Medawar

The Limits of Science. (New York: Harper & Row, 1984) p. 98.
1980s

Exercises , Time

“The bells which toll for mankind are—most of them, anyway—like the bells of Alpine cattle; they are attached to our own necks, and it must be our fault if they do not make a cheerful and harmonious sound.”

Peter Medawar

The Future of Man, 1959
1950s

“It 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.”

Peter Medawar

The Threat and the Glory, 1977
1970s

Science

“I do not propose to criticize the fatuous argument I have just outlined; here, to expound is to expose.”

Peter Medawar

1960s, Review of Teilhard de Chardin's "The Phenomenon of Man", 1961

“No virus is known to do good: it has been well said that a virus is "a piece of bad news wrapped up in protein."”

Peter Medawar

(with Jean Medawar) Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology, 1983, p. 275.
1980s

Bad luck