Peter Medawar

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Sir Peter Brian Medawar (1915 – 2 October 1987) was a Brazilian-born British biologist whose research on graft rejection and acquired immune tolerance was vital to tissue and organ transplant therapy.

He is known as the "father of transplantation" for his work in immunology.

Both in person and in popular books, he is remembered for his wit.

Richard Dawkins referred to him as "the wittiest of all science writers" and Stephen Jay Gould as "the most educated man I have ever encountered."Medawar was the younger brother of a Lebanese father and a British mother and a naturalised British citizen.

He studied at Marlborough College and Magdalen College, Oxford, and was a professor of zoology at the University of Birmingham and University College London.

He was Director of the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill before being partially disabled by a cerebral infarction.

He demonstrated the principle of acquired immunological tolerance (the phenomenon of an immune system's response to certain molecules), which was theoretically predicted by Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet.

This laid the foundation for tissue and organ transplantation.

"For the discovery of acquired immunological tolerance," He and Burnet shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1960.

Early life and education

Medawar was born in Petrópolis, Brazil, 40 miles north of Rio de Janeiro, where his parents were born. He was the third child of Lebanese Nicholas Medawar, born in the village of Jounieh, north of Beirut, Lebanon, and British mother Edith Muriel (née Dowling). He had a brother Philip and a sister Pamela. (Pamela was later married to Sir David Hunt, who served as Private Secretary to Prime Ministers Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill.) His father, a Christian Maronite, became a naturalised British citizen and worked for a British dental supply company that sent him to Brazil as an agent. (He later described his father's work as selling "false teeth in South America." "My birth was registered at the British Consulate in good time to gain the status of a "natural-born British subject"," the British Consulate's chief said at birth.

Medawar and his family left Brazil for England "towards the end of the war," and he remained in England for the remainder of his life. He was also a Brazilian citizen by birth, as required by Brazil's nationality law (jus soli). He applied for exemption from military service to Joaquim Pedro Salgado Filho, his godfather and the then Minister of Aviation at 18 years old, when he was yet to be deployed in the Brazilian Army. General Eurico Gaspar Dutra refused his admission, and he had to renounce his Brazilian citizenship.

Medawar left Marlborough, Wiltshire, in 1928, at Marlborough College. "They were both critical and querulous at the same time, and he was curious what kind of person a Lebanese was," he complained about the school. Also because of its sports pick, in which he was also poor, but also because he was poor. Since being surrounded by two pillars of sex and sadness, an experience of bullying and bigotry made him feel "resentful and dissatisfied with the rest of his life" and compared it to the Nazi SS' training schools. Ashley Gordon Lowndes, his instructor, to whom he credited the beginning of his science work, was one of his best moments at the college. Lowndes was not only literate, but rather "a really good biology tutor." Lowndes had trained eminent biologists, including John Z. Young and Richard Julius Pumphrey Nevertheless, Medawar was intrinsically poor in dissection and was consistently irked by their dictum: "Bloody foolish is the boy whose dissection drawing differs in any way whatsoever from the textbook's diagram."

He began attending Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1932, graduating with a first-class honours degree in zoology. In 1935, Medawar was appointed a Christopher Welch scholar and senior demy of Magdalen. Howard Florey's uncle taught him to study immunology (later Nobel Laureate, and inspired him to pursue immunology) and completed his doctoral thesis in 1941. He became Fellow of Magdalen through an examination in 1938, the highest level he held until 1944. It was there that he began working with J. Z. Young on nerve regeneration. During WWII, his invention of a nerve glue was extremely helpful in surgical procedures of severed nerves.

In 1941, the University of Oxford accepted his Doctor of Philosophy thesis "Growth promoting and growth inhibiting factors in normal and abnormal growth," but the degree was not granted because of the prohibitive expense of supplication. In 1947, the University of Oxford granted him a Doctor of Science degree.

Personal life

Medawar never knew the exact meaning of his surname, an Arabic word for "to make round," but a friend described him as a "little round fat guy."

Jean Shinglewood Taylor, a Medawar war soldier, was born on February 27, 1937. They met in graduate classes at Oxford, he at Magdalen and Taylor at Somerville College. Taylor asked him about the meaning of "heuristic"; she had to ask twice and then have to give philosophy lessons. Medawar referred to her as "the most beautiful woman in Oxford"; however, Taylor's portrayal of her as "mildly diabolical." Taylor's family opposed to their union because Medawar had "no history and no money." Her mother was particularly afraid of seeing "black" grandchildren, although her aunt disinherited her. Charles and Alexander, as well as two children Caroline and Louise, were married.

Medawar was interested in a variety of fields, including opera, philosophy, and cricket. He was remarkably tall, 6 feet and 5 inches, with a strong voice evident during his lectures. He was known for his wit and humour, which he inherited from his "raucous" mother. He did not obtain the degree as he began his PhD studies in 1941 because he could not afford the requisite £25, which he explained:

He was described as the philosopher Karl Popper's most well-known disciple of science.

Medawar was the maternal grandfather of screenwriter and producer Alex Garland's maternal grandfather.

Medawar declared:

Despite his general sympathies with Christianity, especially moral guidance, he found the Biblical stories unethical and was "shocked" by how [Biblical] characters deceived and defrauded each other." "And" he begged his wife "to make sure that such a book did not fall into the custody of [their] children."

Nonetheless, he said the following, which states that although faith has a lot of value for humans in aggregate, it does not support them all equally:

Later life and death

Medawar was invited by the BBC in 1959 to deliver the Reith Lectures, following in the footsteps of his colleague, J.. Z. Reith Lecturer in 1950, a young Reith Lecturer. Medawar explored how the human race will continue to evolve for his own series of six radio broadcasts titled The Future of Man.

Medawar suffered a stroke while reading the text at Exeter Cathedral in 1969, a responsibility that falls on any new President of the British Association. "Monstrous bad luck," Jim Whyte Black's first attempts at devising beta-blockers, which slowed the heartbeat and endangered my career and my career, as he said. Medawar's declining health may have had ramifications for medical science and government relations. Medawar was one of Britain's most influential scientists, particularly in the biomedical field, before the stroke.

Medawar, with his wife's help, reorganized his family's life and began to write and do research, but on a smaller scale. Nonetheless, more haemorrhages followed, and in 1987, he died in the Royal Free Hospital in London, a novelist. In the graveyard of St Andrew's Church in Alfriston, East Sussex, he and his wife Jean (1913–2005).

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Career and research

Medawar was elected a Rolleston Prizeman in 1942, senior research fellow of St John's College, Oxford, in 1944, and a university demonstrator in zoology and comparative anatomy, both in 1944. From 1946 to 1947, he was re-elected Fellow of Magdalen. He was named Mason Professor of Zoology at the University of Birmingham in 1947 and served there until 1951. In 1951, he was Jodrell Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the University College London.

He was named director of the National Institute for Medical Research in 1962. Sir Charles Harrington, his predecessor, was an able administrator, as he said, "No more strenuous than slipping over into the Rolls-Royce's driving seat." From 1971 to 1986, he was head of the transplantation section of the Medical Research Council's clinical research center in Harrow. He was a professor of experimental medicine at the Royal Institution (1977–1983), as well as president of the Royal Postgraduate Medical School (1981–1987).

Medawar's first scientific study was focused on the effects of malt on the growth of connective tissue cells (mesenchyme) in chickens. Howard Florey wrote the manuscript's draft, noting that it was more philosophical than scientific. In 1937, it was published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Physiology.

When Medawar investigated potential improvements in skin grafts, he began his involvement with what became transplantation during World War II. "Sheets of Pure Epidermal Epithelium from Human Skin," his first book on the subject was published in Nature in 1941. His research uncovered a new way for skin wounds among soldiers in the war. He came from Birmingham in 1947, bringing with him his PhD student Leslie Brent and postdoctoral colleague Rupert Billingham. His research became more focused in 1949, when Melbourne biologist Frank Macfarlane Burnet introduced the belief that cells, embryonic life, and later after birth, can distinguish between their own tissue samples on the one hand and unwanted cells and foreign material on the other hand.

Billingham coauthored a seminal paper on grafting techniques in 1951. The American immunologist Santa J. Ono has summed up the paper's continuing contribution to modern science. Medawar's staff devised a way to test Burnet's hypothesis based on this method of grafting. They took cells from young mouse embryos and transplanted them into a new mouse strain. There was no tissue rejection when the mouse was converted to adult and skin grafting from the original strain's original strain. This means that the mouse was able to digest the foreign tissue, which would usually be rejected. Burnet's hypothesis was first published in Nature in 1953, followed by a series of papers, and a lengthy review of the Royal Society B's Philosophical Transactions in 1956, which gave the name "actively acquired tolerance."

Medawar was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1960 by Burnet for their work in tissue transplantation, which is the source of organ transplantation, and their discovery of acquired immunological tolerance. This was used in dealing with skin grafts that were required after burns. Medawar's research led to a change of focus in immunology from one that focuses on the fully developed immune system to one that seeks to modify the immune system itself, as in the attempt to prevent organ transplant rejection in the body. It laid the foundation for the first human organ transplantation, specifically kidney transplantation, initiated by an American physician Joseph Murray, who later received the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The "An Unsolved Problem of Biology" (published 1952) by Medawar addressed ageing and senescence, and he begins by listing both terms as follows:

He then addresses why evolution has allowed organisms to senesce, while (1) senescence reduces individual fitness, and (2) there is no such requirement for senescence. Medawar discusses two primary and interrelated aspects in responding to this query. First, there is an exponential decline in the likelihood of an organism's existence and, consequently, in "reproductive value." It therefore follows that the force of natural selection diminishes gradually with age, as opposed to older age groups (since the fecundity of younger age groups is notably more significant in producing the next generation). What happens to an organism after reproduction is only partially represented in natural selection by the influence on its younger relatives. As judged by life tables, he pointed out that the likelihood of death at various stages of life was an indirect measure of fitness, or the ability of an organism to propagate its genes. Human life tables reveal, for example, that the lowest rate of death in human females comes around age 14, which would presumably be a period of peak reproduction in primitive societies. All three modern theories of senescence have been based on this information.

At a meeting on evolution at Oxford in July 1952, Medawar gave a talk on viviparity in animals (the condition by which some animals give live birth). He wrote an aphorism that was later published in 1953: he introduced an aphorism.

The belief that evolution and diversity of endocrine function in animals are due to different uses of each hormone rather than different hormones alone is a well-known fact. The journal is also known as a pioneer in reproductive immunology.

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