Peter Medawar - Advice to a young scientist (1979)

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I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not.

Peter Medawar
To be creative, scientists need libraries and laboratories and the company of other scientists; certainly a quiet and untroubled life is a help. A scientist's work is in no way deepened or made more cogent by privation, anxiety, distress, or emotional harassment. To be sure, the private lives of scientists may be strangely and even comically mixed up, but not in ways that have any special bearing on the nature and quality of their work. If a scientist were to cut off an ear, no one would interpret such an action as evidence of an unhappy torment of creativity; nor will a scientist be excused any bizarrerie, however extravagant, on the grounds that he is a scientist, however brilliant.

Peter Medawar
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
The intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or false.

Peter Medawar
It is a common failing—and one that I have myself suffered from—to fall in love with a hypothesis and to be unwilling to take no for an answer. A love affair with a pet hypothesis can waste years of precious time. There is very often no finally decisive yes, though quite often there can be a decisive no.

Peter Medawar
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
All experimentation is criticism. If an experiment does not hold out the possibility of causing one to revise one's views, it is hard to see why it should be done at all.

Peter Medawar
A scientist does not hold exactly the same opinions about his research from one day to the next, for reading, reflection, and discussions with colleagues cause a change of emphasis here or there and possibly even a radical reappraisal of his way of thinking.

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