Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

PETER MEDAWAR AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE DAVID PYKE* He was the most brilliant biologist, the most influential scientific thinker, the most lucid writer and the most scintiUating conversationalist of the 20th century.—Kern Wildenthal, President of the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, Dallas. Peter Medawar possessed morefriends, all round the world, than anyone I have ever known or heard of. Possessed is the word: they hung on his words, read with close attention and vast pleasure everything he wrote, rejoiced in his achievements. . . . Peter is ... on the record, with some of the wisest and wittiest remarks of the 20th century. —Lewis Thomas. Peter Medawar was a great scientist. He was also a great writer. No one can need persuading of the truth of the first statement. It is the purpose of this essay to convince doubters of the truth of the second. I shall do so by describing and quoting his non-technical writing, mostly essays collected in his 12 books listed at the end of this paper. But it was not only his general writing that was so good. What could be clearer than the first sentence of the great paper in Nature in 1953, on the discovery of immunological tolerance which led on to the whole science and practice of organ transplantation: "The experiments to be described in this article provide a solution—at present only a laboratory solution—of the problem of how to make tissue homografts immunologically acceptable to hosts which would normally react against them" [1] . It is the sheer beauty of his prose that I think is unique, not only among scientists—a few of whom, such as D'Arcy Thompson and Lewis Thomas, are also great writers—but in the world at large. Does—or did—anyone else write such lovely English as Peter Brian Medawar? He wrote easily. There was little of that hesitation, groping, and tenta- *Royal College of Physicians, London. Correspondence: 17 College Road, London SE21 7BG, United Kingdom. I am greatly indebted to Jean Medawar for help in preparing this paper about her husband. I am grateful to Jean Havill for indispensable secretarial help.© 1996 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/96/3903-0945Î01.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 39, 4 ¦ Summer 1996 | 555 tiveness that most writers know. His prose flowed out as he hammered away with two fingers on his typewriter, sometimes shouting with laughter at one of his own phrases. WhenJames Gowans, later a close colleague and secretary of the Medical Research Council, first went to see Medawar about a job in his laboratory, he heard his laugh down the corridor before he reached him. "Listen to my deathless prose," said Medawar self-mockingly. On top of his scientific and literary genius, what a figure he was. Very tall, extremely handsome, possessed of great charm when he cared to use it, he seemed to have everything. He could certainly be formidable. He had little time for small talk or for trivial social occasions. Work came first. He warned his wife Jean when they married: "You have first claim on my love but not on my time." His consuming interest was science and—unusually for a scientist—philosophy . He was extremely well-read in the history ofphilosophy. In English literature he loved Jane Austen, George Eliot, Trollope, and Tolkien but couldn't get on with Tolstoy or Dickens and had little interest in 20thcentury novelists. He was not fluent in any other language. This is slightly odd, as he had a fine ear for music. Indeed, his passion for opera was such that Gowans described science as what Medawar did between going to operas . Wagner, and to a lesser extent Verdi, enraptured him—so much so that this man normally so austere and so much in control of his emotions was reduced to tears. As he said himself, this emotional intensity was evoked by art rather than by life. He was reduced to jelly by Wotan's farewell to his daughter but was scarcely concerned about his own daughter leaving for America. Medawar's career was a story of uninterrupted success. He became a don at Oxford, a professor at...