The Nobel Prize-winning biologist Peter Medawar (1915-1987) is best known for work that made the first organ transplants and skin grafts possible. In 1979, he published Advice to a Young Scientist, a book brimming with practical advice and philosophical guidance for anyone “engaged in exploratory activities.”
Application, diligence, a sense of purpose
If you want to make progress in any area, you need to be willing to give up your best ideas from time to time
- The key to being a good scientist is the capacity to take no for an answer-when necesssary
- You do not have to be terrifically brainy to be a great scientist, you just need to have common sense
How to make important discoveries
Look for important problems, meaning ones with answers that matter to humankind.
- Don’t mistreat fashion as a movement. Movements lead somewhere, but fashions don’t always have to be followed to get to the end result.
The first rule is never to fool yourself
The intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not
- When you make a mistake, issue a swift correction and make it right
- Do not fall in love with a hypothesis and believe it to be true without evidence
Getting Started
The best way to learn what we need to know is by getting started, then picking up new knowledge as it proves itself necessary.
- Reading becomes counterproductive when it serves as a substitute for doing the real thing, if that’s what someone is reading for
- Psychologically most important to get results, even if they are not original
The best creative environment
Creativity rises from tranquility, not from disarray
- A scientist’s work is in no way deepened or made more cogent by privation, anxiety, distress, or emotional harassment
- To be creative, scientists need libraries and laboratories, the company of other scientists, and a quiet and untroubled life
The secrets to effective collaboration
Scientific collaboration is about researchers creating the right environment to develop and expand upon each other’s ideas
- A good collaboration is greater than the sum of its parts and results in work that isn’t attributable to a single person
- We all have faults, and we too are probably almost intolerable to work with sometimes
- When collaboration becomes contentious, Medawar maintains that we should give away our best ideas
How to handle moral dilemmas
If we think an enterprise might lead somewhere damaging, we shouldn’t start on it in the first place
