Question 1

True or false: Peter Medawar won the Nobel Prize for his work on immune tolerance and skin grafts.

Accepted Answer

True. He shared the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet for discovering acquired immune tolerance.

Question 2

True or false: Medawar originally trained as a zoologist before switching to medicine and immunology.

Accepted Answer

True. He earned his degree in zoology from Oxford and later shifted to experimental pathology and immunology.

Question 3

True or false: Medawar was the first to successfully perform a human heart transplant in the United Kingdom.

Accepted Answer

False. That was Christiaan Barnard in South Africa. Medawar focused on transplant immunology, not surgery.

Question 4

True or false: Medawar believed that scientific progress is purely cumulative and never involves controversy or error.

Accepted Answer

False. He argued the opposite: science thrives on falsification and debate, famously calling it 'the art of the soluble.'

Question 5

True or false: He was knighted in 1965 and later became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Accepted Answer

False. He was knighted in 1965, but CBE is a lower rank. He was a Knight Bachelor, not a CBE.

Question 6

True or false: Medawar was a vocal critic of C.S. Lewis and debated him publicly about religion and science.

Accepted Answer

False. Medawar admired Lewis and even wrote a preface to Lewis's 'The Abolition of Man.' They were close friends, not adversaries.

Question 7

True or false: He suffered a severe stroke in 1969 that left him partially paralyzed but he continued writing.

Accepted Answer

True. The stroke ended his lab work, but he dictated essays and books, including 'The Hope of Progress,' until his death.

Question 8

True or false: He wrote a popular science book titled 'The Art of the Soluble' about creativity in research.

Accepted Answer

True. Published in 1967, it collects his essays on the joy and process of scientific discovery.

Peter Medawar Trivia Questions