Peter Medawar Quotes - Page 2

• 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

  Media, Ciencia, Ideas

  4 Copiar cita

• 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

  Science, Years, Sky

  Peter Brian Medawar (1979). “Advice to a young scientist”, Harpercollins Childrens Books

  4 Copiar cita

• I believe in intelligence, and I believe also that there are inherited differences in intellectual ability, but I do not believe that intelligence is a simple scalar endowment that can be quanitified by attaching a single figure to it—an I.Q. or the like.

  Peter Medawar

  Creer, Ciencia, Simple

  Peter Brian Medawar (1981). “Advice to a young scientist”

  4 Copiar cita

• The art of research [is] the art of making difficult problems soluble by devising means of getting at them.

  Peter Medawar

  Arte, Medio, Ciencia

  7 Copiar cita

• Freudian psychoanalytical theory is a mythology that answers pretty well to Levi-Strauss's descriptions. It brings some kind of order into incoherence; it, too, hangs together, makes sense, leaves no loose ends, and is never (but never) at a loss for explanation. In a state of bewilderment it may therefore bring comfort and relief.... give its subject a new and deeper understanding of his own condition and of the nature of his relationship to his fellow men. A mythical structure will be built up around him which makes sense and is believable-in, regardless of whether or not it is true.

  Peter Medawar

  Relationship, Nature, Loss

  5 Copiar cita

• If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility.

  Peter Medawar

  Cutting, Luck, Ears

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.86, Oxford University Press, USA

  7 Copiar cita

• In all sensation we pick and choose, interpret, seek and impose order, and devise and test hypotheses about what we witness. Sense data are taken, not merely given: we learn to perceive.... The teacher has forgotten, and the student himself will soon forget, that what he sees conveys no information until he knows beforehand the kind of thing he is expected to see.

  Peter Medawar

  Teacher, Taken, Order

  4 Copiar cita

• 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

  Creer, Gente, Líder

  Peter Brian Medawar (1969). “Induction and intuition in scientific thought”

  4 Copiar cita

• 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

  Philosophy, Science, Artist

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.13, Oxford University Press, USA

  17 Copiar cita

• It is high time that laymen abandoned the misleading belief that scientific enquiry is a cold dispassionate enterprise, bleached of imaginative qualities, and that a scientist is a man who turns the handle of discovery; for at every level of endeavour scientific research is a passionate undertaking and the Promotion of Natural Knowledge depends above all on a sortee into what can be imagined but is not yet known.

  Peter Medawar

  Ciencia, Hombres, Descubrimiento

  4 Copiar cita

• 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

  Mistake, Constitution Of The United States, Purpose

  "Memoir of a thinking radish: an autobiography". Book by Peter Medawar, Oxford University Press, p. 117, 1986.

  7 Copiar cita

• No podemos señalar una única solución definitiva para ninguno de los problemas a los que nos enfrentamos: políticos, económicos, sociales o morales, es decir, que tienen que ver con la conducta de la vida. Aún somos principiantes, y por ello podemos esperar mejorar. Burlarse de la esperanza de progreso es la mayor fatuidad, la última palabra en pobreza de espíritu y mezquindad de mente. No hay que dejarse abatir por el hecho de que aún no podamos vislumbrar una solución definitiva a nuestros problemas, un lugar de reposo más allá del cual no tengamos que intentar ir.

  Peter Medawar

  Political, Mind, Progress

  Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Exeter, September 3, 1969.

  4 Copiar cita

• I shall borrow two words used for a slightly different purpose by the great demographer Alfred Lotka to distinguish between the two systems of heredity enjoyed by man: endosomatic or internal heredity for the ordinary or genetical heredity we have in common with animals; and exosomatic or external heredity for the non-genetic heredity that is peculiarly our own - the heredity that is mediated through tradition, by which I mean the transfer of information through non-genetic channels from one generation to the next.

  Peter Medawar

  Malo, Animal, Hombres

  Peter Brian Medawar (1991). “The Threat and the Glory: Reflections on Science and Scientists”, Oxford University Press, USA

  4 Copiar cita

• If the task of scientific methodology is to piece together an account of what scientists actually do, then the testimony of biologists should be heard with specially close attention. Biologists work very close to the frontier between bewilderment and understanding.
  Biology is complex, messy and richly various, like real life; it travels faster nowadays than physics or chemistry (which is just as well, since it has so much farther to go), and it travels nearer to the ground. It should therefore give us a specially direct and immediate insight into science in the making.

  Peter Medawar

  Real, Science, Giving

  Peter Brian Medawar (1969). “Induction and intuition in scientific thought”

  4 Copiar cita

• It is the great glory as well as the great threat of science that everything which is in principle possible can be done if the intention to do it is sufficiently resolute.

  Peter Medawar

  Principles, Done, Glory

  Peter Brian Medawar (1991). “The Threat and the Glory: Reflections on Science and Scientists”, Oxford University Press, USA

  4 Copiar cita

• 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

  Chemicals, Genetics, Process

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.2, Oxford University Press, USA

  4 Copiar cita

• If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.

  Peter Medawar

  Art, Science, Research

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.42, Oxford University Press, USA

  7 Copiar cita

• To deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Mind, Progress

  Peter Brian Medawar (1996). “The Strange Case of the Spotted Mice and Other Classic Essays on Science”, p.119, Oxford University Press, USA

  4 Copiar cita

• I once spoke to a human geneticist who declared that the notion of intelligence was quite meaningless, so I tried calling him unintelligent. He was annoyed, and it did not appease him when I went on to ask how he came to attach such a clear meaning to the notion of lack of intelligence. We never spoke again.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Annoyed, Calling

  "Advice to a Young Scientist". Book by Peter Medawar, p. 25, 1979.

  8 Copiar cita

• It is a truism to say that a good experiment is precisely that which spares us the exertion of thinking: the better it is, the less we have to worry about its interpretation, about what it really means.

  Peter Medawar

  Media, Pensar, Preocuparse

  Peter Brian Medawar (1969). “Induction and intuition in scientific thought”

  4 Copiar cita

• 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

  Spiritual, Religious, Giving

  4 Copiar cita

• You have ... been told that science grows like an organism. You have been told that, if we today see further than our predecessors, it is only because we stand on their shoulders. But this [Nobel Prize Presentation] is an occasion on which I should prefer to remember, not the giants upon whose shoulders we stood, but the friends with whom we stood arm in arm ... colleagues in so much of my work.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Giants, Arms

  4 Copiar cita

• The case I shall find evidence for is that when literature arrives, it expels science.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Literature, Cases

  Peter Brian Medawar (1973). “The hope of progress: a scientist looks at problems in philosophy, literature and science”, Anchor

  4 Copiar cita

• Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won't do. It is an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth century thought.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, America, World

  6 Copiar cita

• 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.

  Peter Medawar

  Obsession, Moments, Danger

  Peter Brian Medawar (1986). “Memoir of a thinking radish: an autobiography”, Oxford University Press, USA

  4 Copiar cita

También te puede gustar:

Frank Macfarlane Burnet

Karl Popper

Ernst Boris Cadena

Joseph Murray

Stephen Jay Gould

Lewis Thomas

Alexis Carrel

Richard Dawkins