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All scientists know of colleagues whose minds are so well equipped with the means of refutation that no new idea has the temerity to seek admittance. Their contribution to science is accordingly very small.
Peter Medawar
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I reckon that for all the use it has been to science about four-fifths of my time has been wasted, and I believe this to be the common lot of people who are not merely playing follow-my-leader in research.
Peter Medawar
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One can envisage an end of science no more readily than one can envisage an end of imaginative literature or the fine arts.
Peter Medawar
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Scientists tend not to ask themselves questions until they can see the rudiments of an answer in their minds. Embarrassing questions tend to remain unasked or, if asked, to be asked rudely.
Peter Medawar
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A danger sign that fellow-obsessionals will at once recognize is the tendency to regard the happiest moments of your life as those that occur when someone who has an appointment to see you is prevented from coming.
Peter Medawar
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Science is no more a classified inventory of factual information than history a chronology of dates. The equation of science with facts and of the humane arts with ideas is one of the shabby genteelisms that bolster up the humanist's self-esteem.
Peter Medawar
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It may seem that palaeontology is a science of pure speculation or inquisitiveness, and the palaeontologist the most unreal and useless of researchers; a man dedicated to retrospection, plunged living into the past, where he spends his days collecting the debris of dead things.
Peter Medawar
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If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility.
Peter Medawar
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The most heinous offense a scientist as a scientist can commit is to declare to be true that which is not so; if a scientist cannot interpret the phenomenon he is studying, it is a binding obligation upon him to make it possible for another to do so.
Peter Medawar
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The formulation of a hypothesis carries with it an obligation to test it as rigorously as we can command skills to do so.
Peter Medawar
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One of the great social revolutions brought about by scientific research has been the democratization of learning. Anyone who combines strong common sense with an ordinary degree of imaginativeness can become a creative scientist, and a happy one besides, in so far as happiness depends upon being able to develop to the limit of one's abilities.
Peter Medawar
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Mathematicians are reputed to be rare and special people, exulting in the exercise of a gift far beyond the performance, and perhaps even the conception, of ordinary people.
Peter Medawar
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Before a good scientist tries to persuade others that he is on to something good, he must first convince himself.
Peter Medawar
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Science will persevere just as long as we retain a faculty we show no signs of losing: the ability to conceive — in no matter how imperfect or rudimentary a form — what the truth might be and retain also the inclination to ascertain whether our imaginings correspond to real life or not.
Peter Medawar
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Scientific theories... begin as imaginative constructions. They begin, if you like, as stories, and the purpose of the critical or rectifying episode in scientific reasoning is precisely to find out whether or not these stories are about real life.
Peter Medawar
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No scientist is admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie beyond his competence.... Good scientists study the most important problems they think they can solve. It is, after all, their professional business to solve problems, not merely to grapple with them.
Peter Medawar
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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. Religious beliefs give a spurious spiritual dimension to tribal enmities.
Peter Medawar
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If a person (a) is poorly, (b) receives treatment intended to make him better, and (c) gets better, then no power of reasoning known to medical science can convince him that it may not have been the treatment that restored his health.
Peter Medawar
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Scientific reasoning is a kind of dialogue between the possible and the actual, between what might be and what is in fact the case.
Peter Medawar
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We shall not read it for its sociological insights, which are non-existent, nor as science fiction, because it has a general air of implausibility; but there is one high poetic fancy in the New Atlantis that stays in the mind after all its fancies and inventions have been forgotten. In the New Atlantis, an island kingdom lying in very distant seas, the only commodity of external trade is — light: Bacon's own special light, the light of understanding.
Peter Medawar
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I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him unintelligent. He was annoyed, and it did not appease him when I went on to ask how he came to attach such a clear meaning to the notion of lack of intelligence. We never spoke again.
Peter Medawar
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The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by accident (though there is a great deal of it) to have contributed anything of permanent value to the storehouse of human thought.
Peter Medawar
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It is not envy or malice, as so many people think, but utter despair that has persuaded many educational reformers to recommend the abolition of the English public schools.
Peter Medawar
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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
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There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus.
Peter Medawar
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Quote of the day
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
Peter Medawar
Creative Commons
Born:
February 28, 1915
Died:
October 2, 1987
(aged 72)
Bio:
Sir Peter Brian Medawar 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.
Known for:
Advice to a young scientist (1979)
Pluto's Republic (1982)
The limits of science (1984)
Most used words:
scientists
people
scientific
thought
science
mind
discovery
fact
true
nature
life
evidence
sense
intelligence
phenomenon
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