Peter Medawar

Life and work

The story behind the role.

English-brazilian biologist (1915–1987).

Sir Peter Brian Medawar (; 28 February 1915 – 2 October 1987) was a Brazilian-born biologist and writer of Lebanese-British descent who, from a succession of research and teaching posts (Oxford through the Royal Institution), and senior U.K. biomedical leadership positions (MRC and RPMC), contributed seminal discoveries in immunology, including one honoured by a Nobel Prize to him and Australian Mac Burnet in 1960. Medawar's works on the discovery of acquired immune tolerance, and on graft rejection, have been fundamental to the medical practice of tissue and organ transplants. For his scientific work, he has been termed the "father of transplantation". He is remembered, as well, for his wit, both in person and in his popular writings. Richard Dawkins referred to him as "the wittiest of all scientific writers"; Stephen Jay Gould as "the cleverest man I have ever known". Medawar was the youngest child of a Lebanese father and a British mother, and a Brazilian and British citizen by birth. He prepared for university admission at a public secondary school, Marlborough College, about which he had ill feelings generally, but was positive with regard to his biology teacher, Ashley Gordon Lowndes. He then pursued his university training in zoology under John Young at Magdalen College, Oxford; after a scholarship and fellowship there, he went on to hold named professorial positions in zoology at the University of Birmingham and University College London. Until he was partially disabled by a cerebral infarction, he was Director of the National Institute for Medical Research (at Mill Hill). With his Oxford, then Birmingham trainees, doctoral student Leslie Brent and postdoctoral fellow Rupert E. Billingham, he demonstrated the principle of acquired immunological tolerance (the…

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