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Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?

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
Publication
Fraud
Scientific
Paper
Science

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A danger sign that fellow-obsessionals will at once recognize is the tendency to regard the happiest moments of your life as those that occur when someone who has an appointment to see you is prevented from coming.
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An experiment not worth doing is not worth doing well.
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Simultaneous discovery is utterly commonplace, and it was only the rarity of scientists, not the inherent improbability of the phenomenon, that made it remarkable in the past. Scientists on the same road may be expected to arrive at the same destination, often not far apart.
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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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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.
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To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.
Peter Medawar
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The art of research [is] the art of making difficult problems soluble by devising means of getting at them.
Peter Medawar
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I regret my disbelief in God.
Peter Medawar
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[A certain class of explanations in science are] analgesics that dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause.
Peter Medawar
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Scientific reasoning is a dialogue between the possible and the actual, between proposal and disposal between what might be true, and what is in fact the case.
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.
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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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Twice in my life I have spent two weary and scientifically profitless years seeking evidence to corroborate dearly loved hypotheses that later proved to be groundless times such as these are hard for scientists-days of leaden gray skies bringing with them a miserable sense of oppression and inadequacy.
Peter Medawar
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I do not believe indeed, I deem it a comic blunder to believe that the exercise of reason is sufficient to explain our condition and where necessary to remedy it, but I do believe that the exercise of reason is at all times necessary.
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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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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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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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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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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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