Sir Peter Medawar Quotes & Sayings

A thoughtful observer of the scientific betting shop, the biologist Sir Peter Medawar, has said: 'I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.' But as Medawar goes on to note, conviction is an incentive to work. Science is one of the most passionate of human activities: how else would researchers be sustained through the long weeks or years of drudgery, why otherwise should Hoyle and Wickramasinghe spend so much time in correspondence with school matrons? If appearances contradict this, it is because all gamblers pride themselves on keeping their outward cool. — Nigel Calder

Sir Peter Medawar, an eminent British biologist who received a Nobel Prize the same year as Macfarlane Burnet, defined a virus as a piece of bad news wrapped up in a protein. — David Quammen