sir peter medawar: science, creativity and the popularization of karl popper

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Notes Rec. R. Soc. (2013) 67, 301–314

doi:10.1098/rsnr.2013.0022

*n

Published online 22 May 2013

SIR PETER MEDAWAR: SCIENCE, CREATIVITY AND THE POPULARIZATION

OF KARL POPPER

by

NEIL CALVER*

Centre for the History of the Sciences, School of History, University of Kent,

Canterbury CT2 7NX, UK

Sir Peter Medawar was respected by scientists and literati alike. It was perhaps not

surprising, then, that he would choose to involve himself in the ‘two cultures’ debate of

1959 and beyond. The focus of his intervention was the philosophy of Sir Karl Popper.

However, Medawar’s Popper was not the guru of falsification familiar from philosophy

textbooks. Medawar’s distinctive interpretation of Popper treated him instead as the source

of insights into the role of creativity and imagination in scientific inquiry. This paper

traces the context for Medawar’s adoption of Popperian philosophy, together with its

application before the debate. It then examines, within the context of the debate itself, the

way in which Medawar attempted to reconcile scientific inquiry with literary practice.

Medawar became increasingly convinced that not only was induction epistemologically

unsound, but it was also damaging to the public role of the scientist. His construction of

Popperianism would, he envisaged, provide a worthy alternative for scientists’ self-image.

.r.ca

Keywords: science; history; twentieth century

Sir Peter Medawar (1915–87) (figure 1), by any reckoning, had it all: a professorship in his

thirties, and Fellowship of the Royal Society and the ultimate accolade, Nobel laureate, while

still in his forties. Headship of the Medical Research Council swiftly followed this, together

with the Presidency of the British Association.1 However, he suffered a debilitating stroke

while giving his Presidential Address to the Association in 1969, leading to a long period

of convalescence that prevented him from taking up the presidency of the Royal Society

in 1970.2 Nevertheless, Medawar’s stoicism and refusal to allow his subsequent

disabilities to detract from his intellectual abilities only added to his standing.3

He had other attributes. One, for instance, was recorded by The Times in 1982. Its then

Literary Editor spoke of how those who could write clearly and elegantly about science

for the unscientific but intelligent lay reader could be counted on the fingers of one

hand—Medawar being one of this rare breed.4 Such an accolade was typical of those

conferred on Medawar’s 30-year quest (1957–87) to speak for, as well as of, science.5

Medawar was reckoned to be the kind of scientist who got science a good name.6 With a

style combining the pungency of Thomas Huxley and the throwaway impatience of

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301 q 2013 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society.

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Figure 1. Image of Sir Peter Medawar taken from his biographical memoir66 (Copyright q Godfrey Argent Studio;reproduced with permission.)

N. Calver302


J. B. S. Haldane, he was deemed to be in the same class as Julian Huxley.7 Richard Dawkins,

one of the very few practising scientists on whom our Literary Editor could apparently rely,

decreed Medawar in 1983 to be the ‘chief spokesman for the scientist in the modern world.’

Read him if you are a scientist and, especially, he suggested, read him if you are not; he was

in no doubt that Medawar, during the course of the twentieth century, had no equal as a

writer of scientific literature.8 Formal recognition for Medawar came in 1987 with the

conferral of the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday Prize for excellence in communicating

science. The Society wrote that the award was

For the contribution his books had made in presenting to the public, and to scientists

themselves, the intellectual nature and the essential humanity of pursuing science at the

highest level and the part it played in our modern culture.9

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Medawar was judged not only to have infused real meaning

into the concept of ‘renaissance man’ but also to have had significance in C. P. Snow’s

thesis about the ‘two cultures’.10 For scientists, he provided ‘excellent reading for the two

cultures and something to put on to the scales of public opinion to counterbalance the

widely propagated image of the modern scientist as a Dr Strangelove figure.’11The Times

was moved to concede:



Sir Peter Medawar 303


I am ashamed to say that C. P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ debate smoulders away. It is an

embarrassing and sterile debate, but at least it introduced us to Medawar’s essays.

Afterwards, not even the most bigoted aesthete doubted that a scientist could be every

inch as cultivated and intellectually endowed as a student of the humanities.12

Medawar was, secondly, acknowledged as Sir Karl Popper’s most high-profile philosophical

disciple within the field of active science.13 In pursuit of a grant from the Nuffield

Foundation allowing Popper to further his research and subsequent publications after his

retirement in September 1969, Medawar considered himself to be one of those who

regarded Popper as the leading philosopher of his time and the only methodologist of

science whose interpretation of the scientific process was simultaneously illuminating,

realistic and practically helpful.14 And indeed it was useful: on receiving his Nobel Prize

in 1960, Medawar wrote, ‘how very deeply I have been influenced by you [Popper] in

immeasurable, practical ways.’ This was, he continued, ‘the great power of your

conception of the scientific process: that it can be seen to hold good, to work in the

everyday affairs of the laboratory.’ He concluded that a share of his success was deeply

attributable to Popper, and that ‘this share will grow larger as your conceptions become

slowly assimilated to the body of received thought.’15

However, Medawar developed from being a disciple of Popper’s to establishing himself as

an extremely influential chief spokesman for Popperianism.16 When it was published in

1959, Popper’s Logic of scientific discovery was greeted with some indifference by the

British scientific community.17 Nevertheless, it was Medawar who would make a significant

difference to Popper’s popularity among a broad range of audiences. Indeed, up until his

death in 1987, scientists and the public alike noted his uncanny ability to capture the

essence of Popper’s ideas in a few short lines. Many held Medawar to be the first to enable

scientists who considered that process matters but did not have the stomach for

philosophical writings to appreciate what Popper had to say in a way that struck a chord

with them.18 In 1983 Richard Dawkins summarized Medawar’s contribution to the

Popperian cause as this:

Part of the appeal was that Medawar was not only a Nobel Laureate, but he seemed like a

Nobel Laureate; he was everything one thought a Nobel Laureate ought to be. If you have

ever wondered why scientists like Popper, try Medawar’s exposition. Actually most

Popperian scientists have probably never tried reading anything but Medawar’s

exposition.19

There were those, however, who thought that although the relationship between Medawar

and Popper was mutually beneficial, Medawar’s praise for the latter lacked insight and scope.

With a dash of cynicism, conceivably, Steven Rose described their association in these terms

for The New Statesman:

Medawar has not found it necessary to shift his broader philosophical framework a

millimetre. Science may have transformed its institutional relationship with the State, been

subject to radical critique as an agent of social repression and had its methodological

underpinnings hacked away in the aftermath of Kuhn, Feyerabend and the sociology of

knowledge; Sir Peter is oblivious to it all, standing guard with his sword drawn on that

frontier between science and non-science which his discovery of Karl Popper seems

to have revealed to him once and for all in some formative philosophical experience of

the 1950s.20



N. Calver304


The substance of this quotation is open to examination. It is arguable—as set out below—

that Medawar’s thinking did in fact evolve, not least in his reorientation of Popperianism

within the context of the ‘two cultures’ debate. On one level he attempted to harness a

level of understanding between scientists and humanists, and on a second level he

made an effort to raise the imaginative faculty of scientists in the public sphere. Thus,

he attempted to eliminate induction from scientific inquiry, while simultaneously raising

the public profile of the scientist. Medawar’s position on Kuhn is not wholly relevant

to this article, but nonetheless there is evidence that he highlighted the greater

relevance of Popperian philosophy to the working scientist.21 And last, in terms of the

chronology of the evolution of Medawar’s thinking, we shall see that this can be traced

back to the 1930s.

RECOGNIZING POPPER’S WORTH

After enduring what he has referred to as ‘four disagreeable years at Marlborough’, Medawar

went up to Oxford in 1932. There he found the philosophical tutorials very much to his taste.

In general, though, Medawar considered British philosophy to be in ‘rather a bad way in

those days.’ Looking back, he recorded in his memoir that epistemologists were gravely

‘contemplating tomatoes through blue spectacles and reporting on what they found, and

the Right and the Good were the subjects of lengthy and inconclusive deliberations.’22 It

was not until he had graduated that

A young teacher in Christ Church wrote a bestseller that was read with breathless

excitement by every student of philosophy in Oxford: A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth

and Logic, a dazzling and revolutionary work which made known to English-speaking

readers for the first time the thoughts of the ‘Vienna Circle’, comprising the

revolutionaries of logical positivism, the views of men such as Carnap, Schlick,

Neurath, and Reichenbach. It was impossible not to be enthused and carried along by

this exciting new movement.23

Medawar later came to hold a more sceptical view of this philosophical revolution.

This was largely due to the timing of his introduction to Popperian philosophy: the

publication in 1945 of The open society and its enemies24—it being, self-confessedly,

Popper’s ‘war work’.25 Medawar seized on this very long, grave, intensely dramatic and,

in some ways, rather shocking book: dramatic, because of the importance and intellectual

strength of its arguments; shocking, because much of the exposition turned on the

criticism and refutation of the opinions of such well-known ‘sacred cows of western

thought such as Plato and Marx.’26 Nevertheless, Popper’s vision of an open society, as

Medawar read it, was a society in which criticism and political dissent were not merely

permitted but were actually made use of for social and political improvement. It was also

a society in which human nature, far from being confined to one politically acceptable

stereotype, could flourish in all its remarkable diversity. Only an ‘open society’ set free

the critical powers of humanity. In short, the open society was one as far as possible

removed from that which he associated with Nazi Germany. Medawar perceived that the

philosophical approach of Ayer and the logical positivists, because of their insistence on

the primacy of logical reasoning, meant that they would never be able to fully address the

realities of human experience. Popper, however, was different. Medawar judged that his

philosophical approach to the problems of social organization—the government would





have a policy about how any aspect of society would be organized, but it also needed to be

open to reviewing that policy in light of its effects—would have a formative role in public

debates over the future of civilization.27

In 1946 Medawar invited Popper to the Theoretical Biology Club at Oxford.28 During their

ensuing conversations, Medawar was struck by the common element that he perceived to

pervade the whole of Popper’s philosophy: recognition that human designs and human

schemes of thought are very often mistaken and that the safest way to proceed is to identify

and learn from mistakes. For instance, there was—as demonstrated by Marxist scientists

such as J. D. Bernal29—a widespread belief and hope that it would be possible to recognize

and propound laws of the historic process and of social transformation—in effect, laws of

historical destiny—that would have the same predictive value as the laws of the natural

sciences. For beliefs of this general kind, Popper coined the word ‘historicism’.30 In a series

of papers published in Economica in 194431 entitled ‘The poverty of historicism’—later

incorporated into The open society and its enemies—Popper had argued that historicism

was without logical foundation. Medawar judged that Popper’s position in the social

sciences could therefore be said to be analogous to that of David Hume’s in the natural

sciences.32 For Hume had caused a similar upheaval of conventional thought when, as

Medawar saw it, he destroyed the foundations of induction, arguing that it was based not on

logical reasoning ‘but upon faith—upon a mere habit of expectation.’33

Moreover, Medawar agreed with Popper’s view that much else—epistemologically—was

wrong with induction. The term ‘induction’ was being used with reference to any scheme

of thought that purported to show that general statements can be compounded of particular

observation-statements. Defined thus, Medawar and Popper considered that induction had no

explanation to offer for two very familiar elements in scientific thought and discovery: error

and luck—for why would a scientist ‘ever fall into error if they were to observe things

correctly and operate a calculus such as John Stuart Mill’s, according to the rules?’ As to

luck, something applicable to all scientists, ‘how could the scientist know he is being lucky

except in terms of the fulfilment of some specific prior expectation?’ Medawar would never

cease to refer to Mill in similarly unflattering terms, as ‘the high priest of induction’.34

Medawar’s understanding of Popperian philosophy broadened and deepened to embrace his

view that the generative act in scientific discovery, or for that matter in the solution of any

given social problem, is the formulation of a hypothesis, the imaginative conjecture of what

the world might be. Thus Medawar saw that what was being tested in an experiment were

the logical implications and consequences of accepting the hypothesis. A well-designed and

technically successful experiment would thus yield results of two kinds: the experimental

results might square with the hypothesis, or they might be inconsistent with it. If the results

were to square with the implications of the hypothesis, the scientist could take heart and

begin to hope that they were thinking on the right lines. In this case, they would then

expose the hypothesis to still more exacting experimental tests. But no matter how often the

hypothesis were to be confirmed, it might conceivably be supplanted by a different

hypothesis later on.35 Medawar was nothing if not a quick learner. When elected to the

Royal Society in 1949, he wrote that, although he had done so before, he was pleased again

to record his gratitude for the guidance that Popper had provided in the formulation of his

experiments. In fact, Popper was entitled ‘to a cut of the credit’ for his election.36

Medawar became reacquainted with A. J. Ayer at the launch of the latter’s founding of the

Metalogical Society, also in 1949; Ayer’s Society had the object of getting philosophers and

scientists to meet and discuss the problems that they felt had implications for, or relevance to,



N. Calver306


or perhaps even solutions in, each other’s fields. Among the scientist members were J. Z.

Young FRS, Lionel Penrose (elected FRS in 1953) and Medawar. Aside from Ayer, the

philosophers present included Popper, Humphrey Slater—who had edited Polemic—and

Bertrand Russell FRS. However, as one participant noted, the influence of the Society

eventually faded out because of a general failure of communication between philosophers

and scientists. Problems that worried the philosophers often left the scientists unmoved,

and vice versa, and the scientists tended not to recognize as their own the aims and

methods that the philosophers attributed to them. That said, with both Popper and

Medawar pointing out its deficiencies, there emerged a consensus around the denial of the

traditional theory of induction. This was to be an important moment: Medawar’s first

semi-public Popperian promulgation. He had succeeded in highlighting to other scientists

the philosophically unsound nature of induction and, by consequence, its untenable

position within their practice.37

It was with his Reith Lectures of 1959 that Medawar came into the wider public

consciousness, affording him the opportunity to promote Popperianism.38 He hailed Popper’s

Logic of scientific discovery—published in English in the same year—as one of the most

important documents of the twentieth century. Inductive accounts, he claimed to the readers

of New Scientist, had the character of a ‘logical autopsy’—dissections of the finished

product of scientific activity. The inference was clear: this was not exactly a recipe for

inspiring scientific inquiry. Popper, instead, was the first to provide an exciting theory of the

process of scientific discovery.39 Drawing on his experience at Ayer’s Metalogical Society,

Medawar foresaw a time when working scientists and philosophers alike would come to

regard Popper’s as the most searching, revealing and ultimately rewarding analysis of the

problem yet undertaken. It is clear that Medawar was now speaking with the authority of an

institutionally recognized scientist, specifically seeking to sway opinion towards the bright

lights of Popperianism. The rather general promulgation of its virtues, though, would change

in the light of the ‘two cultures’.

THE ‘TWO CULTURES’

Medawar’s appeal beyond the scientific world gave him almost unrivalled gravitas with

which to intervene in the ‘two cultures’ debate. C. P. Snow was a particular admirer,

judging that throughout the 1960s Medawar had been able to revolutionize old-fashioned

concepts of science.40 His starting point was that where there should be cooperation there

was instead estrangement. In the 1960s it seemed that the sciences and the humanities

had been

separated by a great sheet of half-silvered glass, a mirror through which it is possible to

see in one direction only. The people on the literary-cultural side are fully absorbed in

their own antics and their own reflections. They have not even a rudimentary grasp

about what is going on on the other side.41

Medawar would, on occasions, cite Aldous Huxley’s plea: ‘Let us advance together, men

of letters and men of science.’42 Such an ambition would, however, only be achieved if

scientists and literati were made aware of each other’s methods and energizing concepts,

and the quality and pattern of movement of each other’s thoughts. Medawar therefore set

out the argument that imagination and criticism are the fundamental components of





scientific inquiry in the very same way in which they pervade literary practice. But in making

such a case, a historical analysis was also provided. Thus Medawar was addressing the

question of why the perception may have arisen that science and the arts were so distinct.

The official view of the nineteenth-century Romantics was, Medawar argued, that reason

and imagination were antithetical—or, at best, that they provided alternative pathways to the

truth: ‘the pathway of Reason being long and winding and stopping short of the summit, so

that while Reason is breathing heavily there is Imagination capering lightly up the hill.’43

This was, he pointed out, the view of Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge. It was

also the view of William Blake, who ‘came in the grandeur of Inspiration to cast off

Rational Demonstration . . . to cast off Bacon, Locke and Newton.’44 ‘I will not Reason

and Compare—my business is to create.’45

Such a view was not only prevalent among Romantic poets. The role of creativity,

Medawar added, had been misrepresented by influential figures within science: William

Whewell had referred to good hypotheses as ‘happy guesses’.46 A philosopher of the

stature of Bertrand Russell had, unfortunately, once referred to hypotheses as ‘a mere

method of making plausible guesses’.47 The word mere offered the impression that little

value should be given to them. It was Newton’s view, however, that stood out most. This

rested on the wide misunderstanding of Newton’s celebrated disclaimer ‘Hypotheses non

fingo’48 (‘I feign no hypotheses’), an abjuration widely taken to mean that Newton did

not indulge in speculation. This, Medawar perceived, was a misrepresentation; what

Newton intended to do was firmly and loftily to disassociate himself from ‘philosophical

romances’ such as Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth.49

Nevertheless, a case could be made, as Medawar phrased it, that the character and

interaction of imagination and critical reasoning were common to the arts and science.

What was more, imagination and critical reasoning were the fundamental principles of

Popper’s scientific methodology. For, as he saw it, all advances of scientific understanding

begin with a speculative adventure, an imaginative preconception of what might be true, a

Popperian conjecture. It constituted an invention of a possible world, or of a fraction of that

world. The conjecture was then exposed to criticism to decipher whether or not that

imagined world were anything like the real one. Scientific reasoning, as demonstrated by

Popper, was therefore at all levels an interaction between two episodes of thought—a

dialogue between two voices, the one imaginative and the other critical: a dialogue, as

Medawar termed it, ‘between the possible and the actual, between proposal and disposal,

conjecture and criticism, between what might be true and what is in fact the case.’50

At another level, Medawar judged that it was because of inductivism, with its

connotations of divisions of social class, that perceptions surrounding the ‘two cultures’

had grown. It had spawned the erroneous belief that there was a great divide between

creative thinkers, people like artists and poets and writers who worked through the

imagination, and scientists who were—intellectually speaking—mere collectors of facts.

Induction, as Medawar saw it, had become sociologically toxic. Its enormous influence

made it seem that scientists were doing no more than analysing and calculating, as

opposed to those in the other culture, who indulged in more overtly imaginative activities.

It was for this reason that Medawar determined it not unfair to trace induction to the

origin of the dichotomy of loyalties that came to be associated with the ‘two cultures’

debate. Popper’s methodology had, moreover, the strength of completely abolishing such

cultural distinctions. Both those in the humanities and those in the sciences could be seen

to rely primarily on the imagination for the generation of ideas.51



N. Calver308


Beyond the immediate necessities of the debate, Medawar was trying to harness Popper’s

reputation among working scientists while raising their public profile. Popperian imaginative

or inspirational process enters into all scientific reasoning at whatever level: it is not confined

to great discoveries, unlike—as Medawar termed it—‘the more simple-minded inductivists

have supposed’. Scientists should no longer be too proud or too shy to talk about creativity

and creative imagination, feeling it to be incompatible with their conception of themselves as

‘men of facts’ and ‘rigorous inductive judgements’.52 To those who considered that the idea

that science was conjectural in character in some way diminished it and, by implication,

those who practised it, Medawar retorted that nothing could be more diminishing than the

idea that the scientist was the collector and classifier of fact: ‘a man who cranks some

well-oiled machine of discovery’.53 Popper’s conception of science was, instead, a

liberating one; one that enlarged and was not diminished by the thought that any truth

begins life as an imaginative preconception of what that truth might be. It put scientists

on the same footing as all others who used the imaginative faculty. Thus Medawar’s

message was, above all, that it was important to realize that science was not a compilation

of facts, or a classified inventory of factual information. In fact, it was a ‘vulgar error to

think so’. All scientists should be very conscious of being engaged in an exciting

exploratory process.54

GETTING THE MESSAGE ACROSS

Medawar reckoned that the contemporary method of scientific communication was in need

of revision. As things stood, it perpetuated the misleading impressions that he was seeking to

address. After being contacted by David Edge, producer of the BBC Science Unit, Medawar

agreed to give a talk that would form the introduction to a series called Experiment, which

promised to give an insight into how scientists really discover things. Medawar raised a

provocative question in his oration ‘Is the scientific paper a fraud?’:

I do not mean that the interpretations you find in a scientific paper are wrong or

deliberately mistaken. I mean the scientific paper may be a fraud because it

misrepresents the processes of thought that accompanied or gave rise to the work that

is described in the paper . . . The scientific paper in its orthodox form does embody a

totally mistaken conception, even a travesty, of the nature of scientific thought.55

Here was the fundamental point. Medawar went on to claim that most scientific papers,

perhaps unconsciously, give the false impression that scientific discoveries merely arise

from inductive observation. They do not make it clear that the essential mental process in

research is the imaginative act, the formulation of a hypothesis to be tested later by

experiments. There was, as one would come to expect, a championing of Popperian

working scientists ‘who were driven ever onwards by a dissatisfaction, a certain

restlessness of mind, always driving the scientist on, telling him to try and devise theories

to explain the strange events in the world about us.’56

Medawar was both surprised and pleased by the response to the programme. He felt that

most listeners had agreed with the gist of his ideas, and that there had been a move away

from the ideas of the inductive method.57 Indeed, Quintin Hogg, shortly to become

Minister of State for Education and Science, was much swayed by the view of science

that Medawar, and hence Popper, was advancing. He had long felt that the process of





scientific discovery was a subject on which ‘something badly needed to be said’.

Furthermore, he said, ‘I had modestly intended to have a go myself one day on these

lines, but now I shall have either to abandon the attempt or concede your claims to

priority.’58 Moreover, Medawar had engaged his audience in a wider debate: The Times

considered that if all future presenters could match Medawar’s elegant and incisive

opening, ‘we can gratefully forget about the two cultures for a bit.’59

Medawar did receive some criticism, particularly from scientists still wedded to the

inductivist approach.60 To these critics he offered the views of Darwin himself, quoting

what the great British naturalist had written to his friend Henry Fawcett:

About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not

theorise; and I well remember some one saying that at this rate a man might as well go

into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that

anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to

be of any service!61

There was, however, a golden opportunity to showcase the benefits of Popper’s

philosophy within scientific discoveries. James Watson’s book The Double Helix, telling

the story of the discovery in Cambridge of the structure of DNA with Francis Crick, was

published in 1968. Medawar and the sociologist of science Robert Merton, almost alone

among a host of reviewers, immediately established a sociological and philosophical

importance in the Watson’s book.62 Merton found that because Watson was telling it like

it was, the book was an important contribution to scientific historiography. The public

record of science, in Merton’s judgement, tended to produce a mythical imagery of

scientific work, in which disembodied intellects move towards discovery by inexorably

logical steps, actuated all the while only by the aim to advance knowledge. Watson, by

contrast, had set this record straight, in showing a variety and confusion of motives, in

which the objective of finding the structure of DNA was intertwined with the tormenting

pleasures of competition, contest and reward.63

Medawar endorsed all that Merton said. Moreover, he recast the whole book to be—he

hoped—an authoritative and objective lesson in the nature of the Popperian creative

process in science. He had every hope that it would become the standard case history of

Popper’s ‘hypothetico-deductive’ method at work.64 Medawar drove home the point that

the whole discovery was due to the rapid alternation of imaginative and critical episodes

of thought—here it could all be seen in motion, and every scientist would come to

recognize the same intellectual structure in their own research. Watson’s account was, in

Medawar’s judgement, ‘characteristic of science at every level’, and indeed characteristic

of most exploratory or investigative processes in everyday life. He was convinced ‘that

any member of the general public who read this book with any kind of understanding

would never again think of the scientist as merely operating the machine of discovery.’

Nobody starting out on their scientific career would henceforward believe that ‘discovery

would only come their way through the inductive process.’ Induction, he hoped, would

become an ‘irrelevance and a travesty of their style of thinking by working scientists

themselves.’ The overall message was very clear: induction was the methodology of

science that was incompatible with the idea that scientists exercised the creative faculty

that was clearly exercised in the fine arts. By contrast, creativity occupied the central

position in the Popperian scheme of thinking: an inspiration, a flash of insight.65



N. Calver310


This paper has charted the progress of Sir Karl Popper’s ideas within the English-

speaking culture, in both the humanities and the sciences. It covers a period of little over

20 years from Popper’s arrival in England to take up his post at the London School of

Economics in 1946. At this time his ideas were known only to a very small circle of

dedicated philosophically minded scientists. By the end of these two decades, thanks to a

very great extent to the championing of his ideas by Sir Peter Medawar, they became

known to a much wider non-scientific audience. Moreover, they had caused many

scientists to completely revise their understanding of the nature of the scientific process.

In addition, Medawar had prompted wider audiences to revise their understanding of the

historical nuances that had led to the creation of ‘two cultures’, pointing out that

previously held social and cultural considerations and influences had been misplaced.

Judged by sheer intellectual rigour alone, all scientists were Popperian, with those same

creative and imaginative qualities—the relative juxtaposition of the sciences in relation to

the humanities. Medawar came to this as a man of international distinction, one

recognized by his position within the institutions of science. His vision and understanding

of science, however, had a breadth, depth and clarity that accentuated the profound

significance of Popperian thinking. Medawar’s uncanny ability to expound on it gave it a

unique relevance to contemporary culture, readily understood at all levels.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A previous version of this paper was given at the ‘The South East Hub’ conference at the

University of Kent on 13 June 2012, and at the ‘Science in Public’ conference at

University College London, on 20–21 July 2012. I am grateful to those who invited me

to speak on those occasions, and to the members of the audience for their helpful

comments. Charlotte Sleigh, Crosbie Smith and Simon Schaffer were very generous with

their time and wisdom. Bryan Magee and Sir James Gowans provided key insights, as did

the anonymous referees who commented on the paper.

NOTES

1 Peter Brian Medawar was born in 1915 in Rio de Janeiro. His father, Nicholas Agnatius, was a

Brazilian businessman of Lebanese extraction, and his mother, Edith Muriel Dowling, was

British. He was educated at Marlborough College and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he

obtained a first-class honours degree in zoology in 1936 and a DSc in 1947. At Oxford he

was successively a Christopher Welch scholar and a senior-demi of Magdalen, a senior

research fellow at St John’s, and a fellow by special election of Magdalen. From 1947 to

1951 he was Mason Professor of Zoology in the University of Birmingham, from 1951 to

1962 Jodrell Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy in University College London,

and from 1962 to 1971 Director of the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill.

From 1971 to 1986 he worked in the Medical Research Council Clinical Research Centre,

Harrow. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1949; he was awarded a CBE in 1958, a

knighthood in 1965, a CH in 1972, and an OM in 1981, as well as honorary degrees too

numerous to mention. In 1960, together with Sir Frank MacFarlane Burnet, he received the

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of immunological tolerance.

2 The Wellcome Library, Private Papers of Sir Peter Medawar (hereafter PP/PBM/). In 1988

Oxford University Press commissioned Dr Robert Reid to write Medawar’s biography. Both





Sir Alan Hodgkin and Sir Solly Zuckerman told Reid that Medawar was due to become President

in 1970 (PP/PBM/MN.9 and PP/PBM/MT.19).

3 Dr Reid’s interview with Sir Solly Zuckerman (PP/PBM/MT.19).

4 The Times, 18 November 1982 (PP/PBM/D.26).

5 Peter Medawar, Memoir of a thinking radish: an autobiography (Oxford University Press, 1986).

6 Hugh Herbert, ‘The thinking radish’, Guardian, 17 May 1988 (PP/PBM/A.104).

7 ‘How the scientist ticks’, Sunday Times (19 February 1967) (PP/PBM/D.10); Anthony Flew,

‘“Top of the class”, review of Medawar’s The Hope of Progress’, Times Educ. Suppl.

(31 May 1976); A. H. Halsey, ‘No more beyond’, New Society (27 April 1972); H. J. Eysenck,

‘The future and elsewhere’, Spectator (16 March 1974). All express a similar opinion (PP/PBM/D.12).

8 Richard Dawkins, ‘The art of the developable’, New York Rev. Books (October 1983) (PP/PBM/D.25); Dawkins to Lady Jean Medawar, 5 October 1987 (PP/PBM/A.98). New

Scientist reckoned him to be ‘perhaps the best science writer of his generation’: ‘Peter

Medawar (obituary), New Scient. 116 (1581), 16 (1987) (PP/PBM/A.14). Other

distinguished, high-profile scientists—Solly Zuckerman, Henry Dale, George Porter, Aaron

Klug and Alan Hodgkin to name but a few—have all spoken of Medawar’s uncanny ability

to make that hardest of breakthroughs for science: to fully engage with those in the arts

(PP/PBM/F.1–37).

9 See http://royalsociety.org/awards/michael-faraday-prize/.

10 Peter Paterson, ‘Tribute to a brain of Britain’, Daily Mail (17 May 1988) (PP/PBM/A.104).

11 Psychological Medicine (February 1981) (PP/PBM/D.20).

12 Patricia Morton, ‘Three marriages in sharp focus’, Daily Telegraph (17 May 1988). Similar

sentiments are expressed in ‘Words of hope’, The Times (17 May 1988) (PP/PBM/A.104);

Sir Edward Boyle, ‘Books of the year—a personal choice’, Observer (10 December 1967)

(PP/PBM/D/10); Alex Comfort, ‘Checking the story’, Guardian (21 August 1969) (PP/PBM/D.12); idem, ‘Toward the essential project’, Guardian (13 April 1972) (PP/PBM/D.15).

13 A view echoed in Bryan Magee, Popper (Fontana & Collins, London, 1973), p. 1.

14 Medawar to Brian Young of the Nuffield Foundation, 13 June 1969 (PP/PBM/A.25). (Italics

my own.)

15 Courtesy of the archives at the London School of Economics (hereafter LSE/POPPER/).

Medawar to Popper, 26 October 1960 (LSE/POPPER/325.26).

16 David Hamilton, ‘Peter Medawar and clinical transplantation’, Immunol. Lett. 21, 9–13 (1989),

at p. 10 (PP/PBM/A.9).

17 Kurt Mendelssohn FRS, ‘Science and logic’, New Scient. 5 (121), 592 (1959).

18 John Maddox, ‘The art of the soluble’, Nature 329, 472 (1987) (PP/PBM/F.47). Converts

included Sir Solly Zuckerman: ‘Popper came to me with his bible—although I didn’t always

manage my responses like a well-trained choir boy. I was particularly fascinated, therefore, by

your analysis.’ Zuckerman to Medawar, 8 June 1968 (PP/PBM/D.9). Also, Sir John Maynard-

Smith: ‘He did make me interested in Popper. If I had to express my philosophy it would be

akin to Popper and this is very largely due to Medawar. He got me reading Popper. I very

much share Peter’s feelings about Popper.’ Conversation with Dr Robert Reid (PP/PBM/F.34).

19 Dawkins, op. cit. (note 8).

20 Steven Rose, ‘The fashion in theories’, New Statesman (February 1984) (PP/PBM/D.44).

21 Adopting Kuhn’s terms of ordinary or normal science is, according to Medawar, relegating

science for the most part to a matter of mundane puzzle-solving within the stifling framework

of received opinion—Kuhn’s paradigms. It is only every so often, however, that the

extraordinary happens: the prevailing orthodoxy is supplanted by a new equally suppressive

orthodoxy that constitutes a new paradigm. In the light of other parallels of how Kuhn sees

the scientific community on the analogy of a religious community and sees science as a

scientist’s religion, Medawar seized on this opportunity. He suggested that the supplanting of

http://royalsociety.org/awards/michael-faraday-prize/

http://royalsociety.org/awards/michael-faraday-prize/



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one paradigm by another might be thought of as a ‘confused and anxious period marked by shrill

cries of heresy and schism.’ In the real world, Popperian scientists construct their own paradigms

in the form of their own opinions—and do not cling to them with any form of religious fervour.

Little movements of unrest are constantly in progress; thus the Popperian-inspired real world of

science is a kind of ‘Maoist microcosm of continuing revolution’. Kuhn, instead, envisages

ordinary scientific life as ‘something more in the nature of a settled opinion in a world of

tranquil God-fearing lower middle-class contentment.’ Medawar, ‘March of paradigms’,

Nature 273, 575 (1978) (PP/PBM/D.39). See also Medawar, ‘Out of the machine-age’,

Times Lit. Suppl. (3 December 1976) (PP/PBM/D.38); Medawar, Advice to a young scientist

(Harper & Row, New York, 1979), pp. 91–93.

22 Medawar, op. cit. (note 5), p. 53.

23 Ibid.

24 Karl Popper, The open society and its enemies (Routledge, London, 1945).

25 Karl Popper, Unended quest—an intellectual autobiography (William Collins, Glasgow, 1986),

p. 115.

26 Medawar, ‘The open society and its greatest friend’, Vogue (December 1973) (PP/PBM/D.9).

27 Medawar, ‘The Philosophy of Karl Popper’, Lecture at the Royal Institution, 4 March 1977 (PP/PBM/D.69).

28 In his intellectual biography An unended quest, Popper recounts how his Logik der Forschung

was surprisingly successful, far beyond his home city of Vienna. There were more reviews, in

more languages, than there were of The logic of scientific discovery 25 years later, and fuller

reviews in English. As a consequence he received many letters from various countries in

Europe with many invitations to lecture. These included one from Bedford College,

London, in the autumn of 1935. (Popper, op. cit. (note 25), pp. 107–108.) It was here

that he first aroused the interest of Professor John Henry Woodger, the biologist and

philosopher of biology. At Woodger’s Theoretical Biology Club in the 1930s he met some

of the distinguished biologists of the day: J. D. Bernal, Dorothy Crowfoot (later Hodgkin),

W. Floyd, J. B. S. Haldane, Joseph Needham, C. H. Waddington, B. P. Weisner and, of

course, J. H. Woodger. Even allowing for the depth of friendship that evolved between the

two men, Popper was steadfast that among such luminaries and other young talent he was

to subsequently meet at Oxford, Medawar—all six foot five inches of him—was the most

outstanding one, both literally and metaphorically. Sir Karl Popper, ‘A new interpretation

of Darwin’, Medawar Lecture, Royal Society, 10 June 1986 (PP/PBM/A.108). The Royal

Society—under the presidential guidance of Sir Andrew Huxley in 1985—wished to endow

a lecture in honour of Medawar. ‘Needless to say the proposal and Council’s acceptance

of it reflect the very high regard in which you are held by the Fellows and countless

others. In suggesting that the subject might be the philosophy of science, Council had

your own interest in it specifically in mind.’ Huxley to Medawar, 25 April 1985 (PP/PBM/A.42).

29 J. D. Bernal, The social function of science (Routledge, London, 1939).

30 Bernal wrote a stinging rebuke of Popper’s ideas on historicism in a review of The open society

and its enemies in ‘Has history a meaning?’, Br. J. Phil. Sci. 6, 164–169 (1956).

31 Karl Popper, ‘The poverty of historicism’, Economica 11, 86–103 (1944).

32 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739).

33 Medawar, op. cit. (note 26), p. 44.

34 Medawar, op. cit. (note 27). For a nuanced analysis of Popper’s philosophy, see Malachi Haim

Hacohen, Karl Popper—the formative years, 1902–1945. Politics and philosophy in interwar

Vienna (Cambridge University Press, 2001). The present paper is not concerned with the

scholastic philosophical debates surrounding Popper’s philosophy. Instead, it concentrates on

Medawar’s association of anti-inductivism with the creative scientific imagination. I am

grateful for the insight of an anonymous referee in this respect.





35 Medawar, ‘Expectation and prediction’, Pluto’s republic (Oxford University Press, 1982),

pp. 238–239.

36 Medawar to Popper, 21 March 1949 (LSE/POPPER/325.26).

37 Rupert Crawshay-Williams, Russell remembered (Oxford University Press, London, 1970),

p. 60.

38 One aspect of the lectures that aroused great interest was his suggestion—provocative at the

time—that population growth might prove a headache in the future. ‘A life’s work based on

faith in the future of mankind’, Sunday Times (24 February 1975); ‘The three battles of a

Nobel Scientist’, Sunday Times (20 January 1980) (PP/PBM/A.106).

39 Medawar, New Scient. 5 (124), 763 (1959). Medawar was writing in response to Mendelssohn’s

review for New Scientist (op. cit., note 17). Medawar attempted to cheer a despondent Popper:

‘Don’t worry!—Not everyone will listen to the baying of a stray ass.’ Medawar to Popper,

14 March 1959 (LSE/POPPER/325.26).

40 C. P. Snow, ‘Things do get better’, Daily Telegraph (10 June 1972) (PP/PBM/F.47); Snow

was quoted as saying that if Medawar ‘had designed the world it would be a better place’.

Transcript of ‘The hope of progress’, Horizon (television programme, BBC1, 14 May 1988)

(PP/PBM/F.72).

41 Medawar, ‘House in order’, World (9 December 1972) (PP/PBM/C.152).

42 Aldous Huxley, Literature and science (Chatto & Windus, London, 1963), p. 72; cited in Medawar,

‘Science and literature’, Romanes Lecture, Encounter 32, 15–16 (1969) (PP/PBM/D.9).

43 Medawar, op. cit. (note 42).

44 William Blake, Milton (1804), bk 2, pl. 4; cited in Medawar, op. cit. (note 42).

45 Blake, Jerusalem—The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804), ch. 1, pl. 10; cited in Medawar,

op. cit. (note 42).

46 William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, vol. 1 (London, 1840), p. 77; cited

in Medawar, op. cit. (note 42).

47 Bertrand Russell, The principles of mathematics (Cambridge University Press, 1903), p. 97;

cited in Medawar, op. cit. (note 42).

48 Isaac Newton, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 3rd edn (1726); cited in

Medawar, op. cit. (note 42).

49 Thomas Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth (London, 1726); cited in Medawar, op. cit. (note

42).

50 Medawar, op. cit. (note 42).

51 Ibid.

52 Medawar, ‘Hypothesis and imagination’, Times Lit. Suppl. (25 October 1963) (PP/PBM/D.5).

53 Ibid.

54 Medawar, ‘Nature and human nature’ (BBC Radio 3, 8 August 1971) (PP/PBM/D.12).

55 Medawar, ‘Is the scientific paper a fraud?’, Listener (12 September 1963) (PP/PBM/D.8).

56 Ibid. Edge was soon to leave the BBC to found the Edinburgh University Science Studies Unit,

from which the new sociology of scientific knowledge stemmed in the 1960s and 1970s. Much

of the work in this field has involved empirically accentuating the kernel of Medawar’s talk,

namely the disparity between how scientists actually work and how they record their work

for publication. For a rich contextualization, see Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: a philosophical

history for our times (Chicago University Press, 2000), pp. 324–331.

57 Medawar to Sir Francis Walshe FRS, 23 October 1963 (PP/PBM/D.8).

58 Quintin Hogg to Medawar, 11 November 1963 (PP/PBM/D.8).

59 Peter Wilsher, ‘Magnificent monologue’, The Times (8 September 1963) (PP/PBM/D.8).

60 Br. Med. J. (21 November 1964). There was a whole flux of letters to Saturday Review

(5 September 1964), for instance (PP/PBM/D.8).

61 Darwin to Fawcett, 18 September 1861. More letters of Charles Darwin (ed. F. Darwin and

A. C. Steward) (London, 1903), p. 176; cited in Medawar, op. cit. (note 52).



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62 Gunther S. Stent, ‘Ne plus ultra’, Nature 240, 265–267 (1972) (PP/PBM/D.14). Those whom

Stent had in mind included Philip Morrison in Life (1 March 1968), John Lear in Saturday

Review (16 March 1968), Jacob Bronowski in The Nation (18 March 1968) and Erwin

Chargaff in Science (29 March 1968). Medawar’s review was singled out by Stent as ‘an

object lesson of what it takes to write a good review in the borderland between literature and

science.’

63 Robert Merton, N.Y. Times Book Review (25 February 1968) (PP/PBM/D.14).

64 Medawar, ‘“Lucky Jim”: review of J. D. Watson, The Double Helix’, N.Y. Rev. Books (28 March

1968) (PP/PBM/D.14).

65 Ibid.

66 N. A. Mitchison, ‘Peter Brian Medawar. 28 February 1915 – 2 October 1987’, Biogr. Mems

Fell. R. Soc. 35, 282–301 (1990).



sir peter medawar: science, creativity and the popularization of karl popper

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