Peter Medawar

Sir Peter Brian Medawar ( born February 28, 1915 in Petrópolis, Brazil, † October 2, 1987 in London, England ) was an English biologist ( zoologist and anatomist ). In 1960 he received together with Frank M. Burnet the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine "for their discovery of acquired immunological tolerance ". Medawar was of the opinion that his former student Leslie Baruch Brent, a native of Pomerania Jew who could arrive in 1938 on a Kindertransport to the UK, would have deserved well worth the price, and sent him a share of the prize money.

Medawar was educated in the years 1928-1932 at Marlborough College, he studied at Magdalen College, Oxford. During the Second World War he worked for the Medical Research Council. In the early 1940s he began to deal with the subject of the immune system and the transplants. He has published in this field together with Thomas Gibson in 1943, a fundamental work The fate of skin homo grafts in man. In this publication, both showed that the rejection of organs that come from unrelated donors with the recipient, based on immunological principles. In 1952, Medawar with the mutation -accumulation theory ( engl. mutation accumulation theory ) one based on the theory of evolution hypothesis to explain the causes of aging of higher species.

In the years 1947 to 1951, Medawar zoology professor at the University of Birmingham, in the years 1951-1962 at the University of London. In 1962 he became director of the National Institute for Medical Research.

1959 Medawar was awarded the Royal Medal of the Royal Society. In 1985 he was awarded the Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science.

Works

• The uniqueness of the individual. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1969
• The art of the soluble. Reflections of a biologist. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 1972, ISBN 3-525-33326-9
• The future of man. The Reith Lectures of the British Broadcasting Corporation. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1967
• Advice for a young scientist. Piper, Munich, Zurich 1984, ISBN 3-492-02867-5
• From Aristotle to chance. A philosophical encyclopedia of biology. Piper, Munich, Zurich, 1986, ISBN 3-492-02901-9