MAY 12, 2020
BRAZILIAN-BRITISH BIOLOGIST PETER MEDAWAR won the Nobel Prize in 1960 for his study of acquired immune tolerance. Beyond his scientific work, he was also a gifted writer and expositor of scientific culture. One of the many treasures of his Advice to a Young Scientist (1979) is a passage in his chapter on “Aspects of Scientific Life and Manners” where he discusses “techniques used in the hope of enlarging one’s reputation as a scientist or diminishing the reputation of others by nonscientific means.”
One such “trick,” Medawar writes, “is to affect the possession of a mind so finely critical that no evidence is ever quite good enough (‘I am not very happy about ™’; ‘I must say I am not at all convinced by …’).” After all, as he writes in a different passage, “no hypothesis in science and no scientific theory ever achieves …a degree of certainty beyond the reach of criticism or the possibility of modification.”