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The attempt to discover and promulgate the truth is nevertheless an obligation upon all scientists, one that must be persevered in no matter what the rebuffs—for otherwise what is the point in being a scientist?

Peter Medawar

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Peter Medawar
Age: 72 †
Born: 1915
Born: February 28
Died: 1987
Died: October 2
Autobiographer
Biologist
Immunologist
Physician
Physiologist
Professor
Writer
Zoologist
Rio
P.B. Medawar
P. B. Medawar
Sir Peter Medawar
Scientist
Otherwise
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Persevered
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Nevertheless
Truth
Scientists
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More quotes by Peter Medawar

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It can be said with complete confidence that any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not enough that a problem should be interesting.
Peter Medawar
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No scientist is admired for failing in the attempt to solve problems that lie beyond his competence. ... Good scientists study the most important problems they think they can solve. It is, after all, their professional business to solve problems, not merely to grapple with them.
Peter Medawar
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Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion shifty-eyed, because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare.
Peter Medawar
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Psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century and a terminal product as well-something akin to a dinosaur or zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity.
Peter Medawar
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The fact that scientists do not consciously practice a formal methodology is very poor evidence that no such methodology exists. It could be said-has been said-that there is a distinctive methodology of science which scientists practice unwittingly, like the chap in Moliere who found that all his life, unknowingly, he had been speaking prose.
Peter Medawar
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In no sense other than an utterly trivial one is reproduction the inverse of chemical disintegration. It is a misunderstanding of genetics to suppose that reproduction is only 'intended' to make facsimiles, for parasexual processes of genetical exchange are to be found in the simplest living things.
Peter Medawar
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I regret my disbelief in God.
Peter Medawar
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An experiment not worth doing is not worth doing well.
Peter Medawar
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All scientists know of colleagues whose minds are so well equipped with the means of refutation that no new idea has the temerity to seek admittance. Their contribution to science is accordingly very small.
Peter Medawar
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Observation is the generative act in scientific discovery. For all its aberrations, the evidence of the senses is essentially to be relied upon provided we observe nature as a child does, without prejudices and preconceptions, but with that clear and candid vision which adults lose and scientists must strive to regain.
Peter Medawar
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The case I shall find evidence for is that when literature arrives, it expels science.
Peter Medawar
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I reckon that for all the use it has been to science about four-fifths of my time has been wasted, and I believe this to be the common lot of people who are not merely playing follow-my-leader in research.
Peter Medawar
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I do not propose to criticize the fatuous argument I have just outlined here, to expound is to expose.
Peter Medawar
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When asked to make the formal declaration that I did not intend to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, I was fool enough to reply that I had no such purpose, but that were I to do it by mistake I should be inexpressibly contrite.
Peter Medawar
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The intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or false. The importance of the strength of our conviction is only to provide a proportionately strong incentive to find out if the hypothesis will stand up to critical evaluation.
Peter Medawar
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Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?
Peter Medawar
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Scientists who think science consists of unprejudiced data-gathering without speculation are merely cows grazing on the pasture of knowledge.
Peter Medawar
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Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.
Peter Medawar
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The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature.
Peter Medawar
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To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous and destructive. Religious beliefs give a spurious spiritual dimension to tribal enmities.
Peter Medawar