Peter Medawar

Sir Peter Medawar
Born Peter Brian Medawar
28 February 1915
Petrópolis, Brazil
Died 2 October 1987 (aged 72)
London, United Kingdom
Residence UK
Nationality British
Fields Zoology; Immunology
Institutions Birmingham University
University College London
National Institute for Medical Research
Alma mater University of Oxford
Doctoral students Rupert E. Billingham, Avrion Mitchison
Influences Howard Florey; J. Z. Young
Notable awards Royal Medal (1959)
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1960)
Copley Medal (1969)
Kalinga Prize (1985)
Michael Faraday Prize (1987)

Sir Peter Brian Medawar OM CBE FRS (/ˈmɛdəwər/; 28 February 1915 – 2 October 1987)[1] was a British biologist born in Brazil, whose work on graft rejection and the discovery of acquired immune tolerance was fundamental to the practice of tissue and organ transplants. He was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet. For his works he is regarded as the "father of transplantation".[2] 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",[3] and Stephen Jay Gould, as "the cleverest man I have ever known".[4]

Medawar was the younger son of a Lebanese father and a British mother, and was a naturalised British citizen. He studied at Marlborough College and Magdalen College, Oxford. He was professor of zoology at University of Birmingham and University College London. Until he was partially disabled by a cerebral infarction, he was Director of the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill.

Life

Early years

Medawar was born on 28 February 1915, in Petrópolis (a town 40 miles north of Rio de Janeiro) in Brazil, the only child of a British mother (née Edith Muriel Dowling) and a Brazilian father of Lebanese descent (Maronite Christian), Nicholas Medawar, who was a businessman.[5] Medawar's status as a British citizen was acquired at birth: "My birth was registered at the British Consulate in good time to acquire the status of 'natural-born British subject'. Medawar left Brazil with his family for England "towards the end of the war", and he lived there for the rest of his life.[6] Peter was also a Brazilian citizen by Brazilian nationality law (jus soli), but renounced his citizenship by refusing military conscription required of Brazilian men.[7][8]

Medawar was educated at Marlborough College and Magdalen College, Oxford, and completed zoology first-class honours in 1935. He became a Christopher Welch scholar and senior demy of Magdalen in 1935, a senior research fellow of St John's College, Oxford, in 1944, and a fellow by special election of Magdalen during 1938 to 1944 and 1946 to 1947). He obtained a DSc in 1947.[9]

Career

Medawar was Mason professor of zoology at the University of Birmingham between 1947 and 1951. He became Jodrell professor of zoology and comparative anatomy in University College London in 1951. In 1962 he was appointed director of the National Institute for Medical Research. He was head of the transplantation section of the Medical Research Council's clinical research centre, Harrow, from 1971 to 1986. He became professor of experimental medicine at the Royal Institution (1977–83), and president of the Royal Postgraduate Medical School (1981–87).[9]

Awards and honours

Medawar was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1949. The British government conferred him a CBE in 1958, knighted him in 1965, and appointed him to the Order of Merit in 1981. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1981. He received the Royal Society's Royal Medal in 1959, and its Copley Medal in 1969. He was President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science during 1968–1969.[9] He was awarded the UNESCO Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science in 1985.[10][11] He was awarded a DSc Honorary Degree in 1961 by Birmingham University.[12]

Personal life

Medawar married Jean Shinglewood Taylor on 27 February 1937. They met while in graduate class at Magdalen. Taylor approached him for the meaning of "heuristic", which she had to ask twice, and he had to finally offer lessons in philosophy. They had two sons, Charles and Alexander, and two daughters, Caroline and Louise. He never knew the exact meaning of his surname, an Arabic word, he was told, for "to make round"; but which a friend explained to him as "little round fat man".

Medawar was a scientist of great inventiveness who was interested in many other subjects including opera, philosophy and cricket. He was exceptionally tall, 6 ft and 5 inches, physically robust, with a big voice noted particularly during his lectures. He was renowned for wit and humour, which he claimed inherited from his "raucous" mother. He did not receive a PhD as he could not afford the requisite ₤25, to which he commented, "Morally I'm a PhD, ... Anyway it was unfashionable in my day. John Young [probably referring to John Zachary Young] was not a PhD either." He was regarded as the philosopher Karl Popper's best-known disciple in science.[5]

Later years

In 1959 Medawar was invited by the BBC to present the broadcaster's annual Reith Lectures - following in the footsteps of his colleague, John Zachary Young, who was Reith Lecturer in 1950. For his own series of six radio broadcasts, titled The Future of Man,[13] Medawar examined how the human race might continue to evolve.

Whilst attending the annual British Association meeting in 1969, Medawar suffered a stroke when reading the lesson at Exeter Cathedral, a duty which falls on every new President of the British Association. It was, as he said, "monstrous bad luck because Jim Whyte Black had not yet devised beta-blockers, which slow the heart-beat and could have preserved my health and my career".[14] Medawar’s failing health may have had repercussions for medical science and the relations between the scientific community and government. Before the stroke, Medawar was one of Britain's most influential scientists, especially in the biomedical field.

After the impairment of his speech and movement, Medawar, with his wife's help, reorganised his life and continued to write and do research though on a greatly restricted scale. However, more haemorhages followed and in 1987 he died in the Royal Free Hospital, London. He is buried — as is his wife Jean (1913–2005) — at Alfriston in East Sussex.[15]

Views on religion

Medawar declared:

... I believe that a reasonable case can be made for saying, not that we believe in God because He exists but rather that He exists because we believe in Him... Considered as an element of the world, God has the same degree and kind of objective reality as do other products of mind... I regret my disbelief in God and religious answers generally, for I believe it would give satisfaction and comfort to many in need of it if it were possible to discover and propound good scientific and philosophic reasons to believe in God... To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous and destructive... I am a rationalist—something of a period piece nowadays, I admit...[16]

Medawar was also a realist in pointing out in his book "Advice to a Young Scientist" that there is no quicker way for a scientist to bring discredit on himself and his profession particularly when no declaration is called for, than to declare that science knows or will know the answers to all questions worth asking. He added that questions that do not admit a scientific answer should not be assumed to be non-questions, "We must turn to imaginative literature and religion for suitable answers!"

Research

Early research

Medawar's involvement with what became transplant research began during WWII, when he investigated possible improvements in skin grafts. It became focused in 1949, when Burnet advanced the hypothesis that during embryonic life and immediately after birth, cells gradually acquire the ability to distinguish between their own tissue substances on the one hand and unwanted cells and foreign material on the other.

With Rupert Billingham, he published a seminal paper in 1951.[17] Santa J. Ono, the American immunologist, has described the enduring impact of this paper to modern science.[18]

Outcome of research

Medawar was awarded his Nobel Prize in 1960 with Burnet for their work in tissue grafting which is the basis of organ transplants, and their discovery of acquired immunological tolerance. This work was used in dealing with skin grafts required after burns. Medawar's work resulted in a shift of emphasis in the science of immunology from one that attempts to deal with the fully developed immunity mechanism to one that attempts to alter the immunity mechanism itself, as in the attempt to suppress the body's rejection of organ transplants.[19][20]

Theory of senescence

Medawar's 1951 lecture An unsolved problem of biology (published 1952[21]) addressed ageing and senescence, and he begins by defining both terms as follows:

We obviously need a word for mere ageing, and I propose to use 'ageing' itself for just that purpose. 'Ageing' hereafter stands for mere ageing, and has no other innuendo. I shall use the word 'senescence' to mean ageing accompanied by that decline of bodily faculties and sensibilities and energies which ageing colloquially entails.

He then tackles the question of why evolution has permitted organisms to senesce, even though (1) senescence lowers individual fitness, and (2) there is no obvious necessity for senescence. In answering this question, Medawar provides two fundamental and interrelated insights. First, there is an inexorable decline in probability of an organism's existence, and, therefore, in what he terms "reproductive value." He suggests that it therefore follows that the force of natural selection weakens progressively with age late in life (because the fecundity of younger age-groups is overwhelmingly more significant in producing the next generation). What happens to an organism after reproduction is only weakly reflected in natural selection by the effect on its younger relatives. He pointed out that likelihood of death at various times of life, as judged by life tables, was an indirect measure of fitness, that is, the capacity of an organism to propagate its genes. Life tables for humans show, for example that the lowest likelihood of death in human females comes at about age 14, which in primitive societies would likely be an age of peak reproduction. This has served as the basis for all three modern theories for the evolution of senescence.[22][23][24]

Books

Medawar was recognised as a brilliant author: Richard Dawkins called him "the wittiest of all scientific writers"[3] and New Scientist magazine's obituary called him "perhaps the best science writer of his generation".[25] He was also awarded the 1987 Michael Faraday Prize "for the contribution his books had made in presenting to the public, and to scientists themselves, the intellectual nature and the essential humanity of pursuing science at the highest level and the part it played in our modern culture".

His books include The Uniqueness of Man, which includes essays on immunology, graft rejection and acquired immune tolerance; Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought; The Art of the Soluble, a book of essays, later reprinted in Pluto's Republic; Advice to a Young Scientist; Aristotle to Zoos (with his wife Jean Shinglewood Taylor); The Life Science, The Limits of Science and his last, in 1986, Memoirs of a Thinking Radish, an autobiography. One of his best-known essays is his 1961 criticism of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, of which he said: "Its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself".[26][27]

Apart from his books on science and philosophy, it is interesting to note a short feature article on “Some Meistersinger Records” in the issue of The Gramophone for November 1930. The author was a P.B. Medawar. The evidence that this was indeed the future Sir Peter Medawar – then a schoolboy of 15 – was discussed in “Gramophone” in 1995 (“‘Gramophone’, Die Meistersinger and immunology”, by John E Havard, December 1995).

References

Notes

  1. ↑ Mitchison, N. A. (1990). "Peter Brian Medawar. 28 February 1915-2 October 1987". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 35 (0): 282–301. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1990.0013. PMID 11622280.
  2. ↑ Starzl, TE (1995). "Peter Brian Medawar: father of transplantation.". Journal of the American College of Surgeons 180 (3): 332–6. PMC 2681237. PMID 7874344.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Dawkins, [edited by] Richard (2008). The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 179. ISBN 0-19-921680-0.
  4. ↑ Gould, Stephen Jay (2011). The Lying Stones of Marrakech : Penultimate Reflections in Natural History (1st Harvard University Press ed. ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 305. ISBN 9780674061675.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Sir Peter Medawar". New Scientist. 12 April 1984. Retrieved 27 February 2014.
  6. ↑ Medawar P.B. 1986. Memoirs of a thinking radish: an autobiography. Oxford. p5
  7. ↑ "Brazilian Nobel". www.brazzil.com. Retrieved 13 July 2014.
  8. ↑ "Diploma revalidation in Brazil: abandon all hope ye who need it". Leonardo M Alves's Blog. 31 January 2013. Retrieved 13 July 2014.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Mitchison, Avrion (2009) [2004]. "Medawar, Sir Peter Brian (1915–1987)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/40016. Retrieved 27 February 2014.
  10. ↑ "List of Kalinga Prize Laureates". Kalinga Foundation Trust. Retrieved 15 April 2014.
  11. ↑ "Kalinga Prize laureate". UNESCO. Retrieved 15 April 2014.
  12. ↑ http://bhamalumni.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=1111&frcrld=1
  13. ↑ "Peter Medawar: The Future of Man: 1959". BBC Radio4. BBC. Retrieved 27 February 2014.
  14. ↑ Medawar P.B. 1986. Memoirs of a thinking radish: an autobiography. Oxford. p153
  15. ↑ Leslie Baruch Brent. "Jean Medawar's obituary" Independent, The (London). 12 May 2005.
  16. ↑ Peter Medawar 1984. 'The question of the existence of God' in The limits of science Harper and Row.
  17. ↑ Billingham, R.E.; Medawar, P.B. (1951). "The Technique of Free Skin Grafting in Mammals" (PDF). Journal of Experimental Biology 28 (3): 385–402.
  18. ↑ Ono, Santa Jeremy (2004). "The Birth of Transplantation Immunology: the Billingham--Medawar Experiments at Birmingham University and University College London" (PDF). Journal of Experimental Biology 207 (23): 4013–4014. doi:10.1242/jeb.01293. PMID 15498946.
  19. ↑ Park, Hyung Wook (2010). "‘The shape of the human being as a function of time’: time, transplantation, and tolerance in Peter Brian Medawar's research, 1937–1956". Endeavour 34 (3): 112–121. doi:10.1016/j.endeavour.2010.07.002. PMID 20692038.
  20. ↑ Simpson, Elizabeth (2004). "Reminiscences of Sir Peter Medawar: In Hope of Antigen-Specific Transplantation Tolerance". American Journal of Transplantation 4 (12): 1937–1940. doi:10.1111/j.1600-6143.2004.00687.x. PMID 15575894.
  21. ↑ Medawar, P.B. (1952). 'An unsolved problem of biology' HK Lewis and Co.
  22. ↑ Ljubuncic, Predrag; Reznick, Abraham Z. (2009). "The Evolutionary Theories of Aging Revisited – A Mini-Review". Gerontology 55 (2): 205–216. doi:10.1159/000200772. PMID 19202326.
  23. ↑ Charlesworth, B (2000). "Fisher, Medawar, Hamilton and the evolution of aging.". Genetics 156 (3): 927–31. PMC 1461325. PMID 11063673.
  24. ↑ Promislow, Daniel E.L.; Pletcher, Scott D. (2002). "Advice to an aging scientist". Mechanisms of Ageing and Development 123 (8): 841–850. doi:10.1016/S0047-6374(02)00021-0. PMID 12044932.
  25. ↑ Editorial (October 1987). "Peter Medawar (obituary)". New Scientist 116 (1581): 16.
  26. ↑ Medawar, Peter (1996). "The Phenomenon of Man". In . The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice: And other classic essays on science. Oxford, UK & New York: Oxford University Press. p. 1. ISBN 0-19-286193-X. Retrieved 25 September 2010  Originally published 1961 in Mind, 70, 99–106
  27. ↑ Medawar, P.B (1961). "Critical Notice". Mind LXX (277): 99–106. doi:10.1093/mind/LXX.277.99.

Bibliography

External links

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