Sir Peter Brian Medawar (; 28 February 1915 – 2 October 1987) was a Brazilian-born biologist and writer of Lebanese-British descent who, from a succession of research and teaching posts (Oxford through the Royal Institution), and senior U.K. biomedical leadership positions (MRC and RPMC), contributed seminal discoveries in immunology, including one honoured by a Nobel Prize to him and Australian Mac Burnet in 1960. Medawar's works on the discovery of acquired immune tolerance, and on graft rejection, have been fundamental to the medical practice of tissue and organ transplants. For his scientific work, he has been termed the "father of transplantation". He is remembered, as well, for his wit, both in person and in his popular writings. Richard Dawkins referred to him as "the wittiest of all scientific writers"; Stephen Jay Gould as "the cleverest man I have ever known". 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."
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