Medawar, Peter Brian (1915-1987)

Brazilian-born British immunologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1960 with Macfarlane Burnet for their work on acquired immunological tolerance of transplanted tissues. They discovered that the body's resistance to grafted tissue is undeveloped in the newborn child, and studied the way it is acquired. Medawar was knighted in 1965.

Medawar's work has been vital in understanding the phenomenon of tissue rejection following transplantation.

He shared the 1960 Nobel Prize for Medicine with Burnet (1899-1985), an Australian who also worked on acquired immunological tolerance.

Medawar was born in Rio de Janeiro and studied in the UK at Oxford. He was professor of zoology at Birmingham University in the period 1947-51 and at University College, London, in 1951-62. He was director of the National Institute for Medical Research in the period 1962-75. In 1977 he was appointed professor of experimental medicine at the Royal Institution.

Acting on Burnet's hypothesis that an animal's ability to produce a specific antibody is not inherited, Medawar inoculated mouse embryos of one strain with cells from mice of another strain, and found that the embryos did not produce antibodies against the cells of the other strain.

Medawar wrote essays for the general reader, collected in, for example, The Hope of Progress (1972), The Art of the Soluble (1967), and The Limits of Science (1985).