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Peter Medawar

Brazilian-British biologist (1915–1987)

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Peter Medawar
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Through Clement Attlee and World War I

Medawar was the youngest child of a Lebanese father and a British mother, and a Brazilian and British citizen by birth. He prepared for university admission at a public secondary school, Marlborough College, about which he had ill feelings generally, but was positive with regard to his biology teacher, Ashley Gordon Lowndes. He then pursued his university training in zoology under John Young at Magdalen College, Oxford; after a scholarship and fellowship there, he went on to hold named professorial positions in zoology at the University of Birmingham and University College London. Until he was partially disabled by a cerebral infarction, he was Director of the National Institute for Medical Research (at Mill Hill).

With his Oxford, then Birmingham trainees, doctoral student Leslie Brent and postdoctoral fellow Rupert E. Billingham, he demonstrated the principle of acquired immunological tolerance (the phenomenon of unresponsiveness of the immune system to certain molecules), which was theoretically predicted by Mac Burnet. The understanding of immunological tolerance became the foundation of tissue and organ transplantation. He and Burnet shared the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for discovery of acquired immunological tolerance".

Early life and education

Medawar is stated as having been born on 28 February 1915 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a place his parents had taken residence, and elsewhere as having been born in Petrópolis, a Brazilian Imperial City, 40 kilometres (25 mi) north of Rio de Janeiro city. He was the third of three children of his British mother Edith Muriel (née Dowling), and his father, a naturalised British citizen, Nicholas Agnatius Medawar, who had been born in the village of Jounieh, north of Beirut, Lebanon. 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 Lebanese Maronite by heritage, worked for a British dental supplies manufacturer that sent him to Brazil as an agent. He later described his father's profession as selling "false teeth in South America". Peter Medawar's status as a British citizen was acquired at birth, as he said, "My birth was registered at the British Consulate in good time to acquire the status of 'natural-born British subject'."

Medawar left Brazil with his family for England at the end of World War I, in 1918 and he lived there for the rest of his life. According to other accounts, he moved to England when he was 13 (i.e., 1928–1929) or 14 (i.e., 1929–1930). Under Brazilian nationality law, he had Brazilian citizenship from having been born there (jus soli). When he turned 18, the age at which Brazilians are liable to conscription, he applied for exemption to Joaquim Pedro Salgado Filho, his godfather and the then Minister of Aviation. This was denied by President Eurico Gaspar Dutra, so Medawar renounced his Brazilian citizenship.

In 1928, before university, Medawar went to the U.K. secondary educational institution, the public school, Marlborough College, in Wiltshire. (That school, while not disclosed in his autobiography, is explicitly disclosed in other media venues, including an extensive 1984 profile in New Scientist, a profile in which he is quoted as identifying the school.)

Medawar has spoken—in statements reproduced in quotation—both negatively and positively about his secondary school; on the one hand, he has noted that his classmates "were critical and querulous at the same time, wondering what kind of person [he, ] a Lebanese was—something foreign you can be sure", and that the school emphasised sport, an area in which he was weak. Medawar refers to himself, again in his own words, as "uniformly unhappy from beginning to end" in his time at Marlborough, reflecting—in addition to the response of fellow students to his foreign heritage—that he witnessed bullying there, things that left him "resentful and disgusted at the manners and mores of [what he viewed as that] essentially tribal institution" the rest of his life. (He would go in his statements to further liken Marlborough to the training schools for the Nazi SS, "founded upon the twin pillars of sex and sadism.") With regard to their biology instruction, Medawar found anatomical dissection of animals, an area in which he was weak, to be "pedagogically useless and exasperatingly boring"; the school dictum's about which was, by Medawar's description, "[b]loody foolish is the boy whose drawing of his dissection differs in any way whatsoever from... the textbook."

On the other hand, he reflects positively upon his time under his Marlborough biology instructor, Ashley Gordon Lowndes, to whom he has referred as a "very, very good biology teacher". Despite describing him as being "almost incapable of expressing himself", Medawar states that Lowndes, who received a ScD from Cambridge University while teaching, was "quite good", going on to say,

He fired me with enthusiasm. He adored his subject, and was so passionate about it that that communicated itself[,]

such that a media profile of him credits this relationship and institution with being the place where Medawar's "scientific career took its start". (Lowndes had also taught professors and Royal Society fellows J.Z. Young and R.J. Pumphrey.) Noting the need his family felt that he get a scholarship to Oxford—one of the motivations for Medawar's attending Marlborough—he noted that he did not win such, and that he had "never been any good at competitive exams".

Nevertheless, in 1932, he went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating with a first-class honours degree in zoology in 1935. Medawar was then appointed a Christopher Welch scholar, and then a senior demy of Magdalen in 1935. He also worked at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology supervised by Howard Florey (later Nobel laureate, and who inspired him to take up immunology) and completed his doctoral thesis in 1941. In 1938, he became Fellow of Magdalen through an examination, the position he held until 1944. It was there that he started working with J. Z. Young on the regeneration of nerves. His invention of a nerve glue proved useful in surgical operations of severed nerves during World War II.

The University of Oxford approved his Doctor of Philosophy thesis titled "Growth promoting and growth inhibiting factors in normal and abnormal development" in 1941, but because of the prohibitive cost of supplication (the process by which the degree is officially conferred), he spent the money on his urgent appendicectomy instead. The University of Oxford later awarded him a Doctor of Science degree in 1947.

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