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Sir Peter B. Medawar
(28 Feb 1915 - 2 Oct 1987)
English immunologist and author who was awarded a Nobel Prize for making skin grafts possible without tissue rejection.
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Sir Peter B. Medawar Quotes on Imagination (4 quotes)
>> Click for 53 Science Quotes by Sir Peter B. Medawar
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>> Click for 53 Science Quotes by Sir Peter B. Medawar
>> Click for Sir Peter B. Medawar Quotes on | Discovery | Evidence | Hypothesis | Mind | Process | Scientist | Theory | Truth |
Every discovery, every enlargement of the understanding, begins as an imaginative preconception of what the truth might be. The imaginative preconception—a “hypothesis”—arises by a process as easy or as difficult to understand as any other creative act of mind; it is a brainwave, an inspired guess, a product of a blaze of insight. It comes anyway from within and cannot be achieved by the exercise of any known calculus of discovery.
— Sir Peter B. Medawar
In Advice to a Young Scientist (1979), 84.
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 preceisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.
— Sir Peter B. Medawar
The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science (1996), 63.
Haldane could have made a success of any one of half a dozen careers—as mathematician, classical scholar, philosopher, scientist, journalist or imaginative writer. On his life’s showing he could not have been a politician, administrator (heavens, no!), jurist or, I think, a critic of any kind. In the outcome he became one of the three or four most influential biologists of his generation.
— Sir Peter B. Medawar
Essay, 'J.B.S.', in Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating The Art of the Soluble and Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought (1982), collected in The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science (1996), 87.
Scientists should not be ashamed to admit, as many of them apparently are ashamed to admit, that hypotheses appear in their minds along uncharted by-ways of thought; that they are imaginative and inspirational in character; that they are indeed adventures of the mind.
— Sir Peter B. Medawar
In 'Is the Scientific Paper Fraudulent?', The Saturday Review (1 Aug 1964), 43.
See also:
- 28 Feb - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Medawar's birth.
- Advice to a Young Scientist, by Sir Peter Brian Medawar. - book suggestion.
- Booklist for Peter Medawar.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
