Books
Medawar was recognized as a brilliant author: Richard Dawkins called him "the wittiest of all scientific writers" and New Scientist magazine's obituary called him "perhaps the best science writer of his generation". He was also awarded the 1987 Michael Faraday Prize "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".
His books include The Uniqueness of Man, which includes essays on immunology, graft rejection and acquired immune tolerance; Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought; The Art of the Soluble, a book of essays, later reprinted in Pluto's Republic; Advice to a Young Scientist; Aristotle to Zoos (with his wife Jean Shinglewood Taylor); The Life Science, The Limits of Science and his last, in 1986, Memoirs of a Thinking Radish, an autobiography. One of his best-known essays is his 1961 criticism of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man, of which he said: "Its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself".
- The Future of Man: the BBC Reith Lectures 1959, Methuen, London 1960
- Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought, Methuen & Co. London 1969
- The Hope of Progress: A Scientist looks at Problems in Philosophy, Literature and Science, Anchor Press / Doubleday, Garden City 1973
- The Threat and the Glory: Reflections on Science and Scientists (ed.: David Pyke), a posthumously collected volume of essays, Harper Collins 1980
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Famous quotes containing the word books:
“Be a little careful about your library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you? You will come here and get books that will open your eyes, and your ears, and your curiosity, and turn you inside out or outside in.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me
None of my books will show:
I reade, and sigh, and wish I were a tree;”
—George Herbert (1593–1633)