Like all men who enjoy teaching most, Sir Peter Brian Medawar, DSc, delights in idea-dropping.
Indeed, the biologist is capable of precipitating key thoughts from an impressive height. In addition to some 6 1/2 feet of physical stature, he has the lofty perch of a Nobel prize from which to work.
Sir Peter shared the 1960 prize in medicine with Sir Macfarlane Burnet for providing laboratory proof of a critical idea in transplantation studies—acquired immunological tolerance.
Now the director of England's National Institute for Medical Research, the laureate was in the United States recently to give the Sixth Annual Anton J. Carlson Memorial Lecture at the University of Chicago. ( "In America," Dwight J. Ingle, PhD, Chicago professor and chairman of physiology announced, "Professor Medawar would rather we dispensed with the 'Sir'.") Among the ideas presented in his "status report" on transplantation were that: