Peter Medawar - Science Quotes

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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
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
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
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 Medawar
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 Moliere who found that all his life, unknowingly, he had been speaking prose.

Peter Medawar
Biology is complex, messy and richly various, like real life; it travels faster nowadays than physics or chemistry (which is just as well, since it has so much farther to go), and it travels nearer to the ground. It should therefore give us a specially direct and immediate insight into science in the making.

Peter Medawar
Nowadays we all give too much thought to the material blessings or evils that science has brought with it, and too little to its power to liberate us from the confinements of ignorance and superstition. The greatest liberation of thought achieved by the scientific revolution was to have given human beings a sense of future in this world.

Peter Medawar
It can be said that Science progresses only by peeling away, one after another, all the covering of apparent stability in the world; disclosing beneath the immobility of the infinitely small, movement of extra rapidity, and beneath the immobility of the Immense, movement of extra slowness.

Peter Medawar
Science can only proceed on a basis of confidence, so that scientists do not suspect each other of dishonesty or sharp practice, and believe each other unless there is very good reason to do otherwise.

Peter Medawar
What is research but learning - and what scientist ever feels that, being complete, his research is now at last finished? The nature of science is such that a scientist goes on learning all his life - and must - and exults in the obligation upon him to do so.

Peter Medawar
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
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
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
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
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
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