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| Professor Medawar was an eminent British scientist of Lebanese origin, a biologist and winner of two Nobel Prizes, in addition to Edward Chapman Research Prize. Professor Medawar was born in February 28, 1915 in Brazil of a British mother and a Lebanese father. He received his education at Magdalene College, Oxford in 1935 where he gained admission of Christopher Welch Scholarship and Senior Demyship to back up his scientific research. Three years later, he received the Edward Chapman Research Prize and was named a "Fellow by Examination" as a result of his successful work on organic growth and transformation in animal organ. In 1944, Professor Medawar became an assistant professor of Zoology at St. John College, Oxford. He also worked on Penicillin and received as a result the Nobel Prize with Sir Howard Florey in 1945. Six years later, he became a "Jodrell Professor" of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College, London. Also, he lectured on several occasions at Harvard University (USA), Otago University (New Zealand) and in the USSR. His lectures to the British Broadcasting Corporation (Reith Lectureship) were bound in a book "The Future of Man" in 1959. It includes six lectures about genetics, human intelligence and some medical problems. It was considered by C. H. Weddington as "a really first class piece of scientific popularizing". Being a member of the Royal Society, he was honored in 1958 with the Royal Medal. In that year, he was given the name of "Commander of the Order of the British Empire" by Queen Elizabeth 11. Sir Medawar was also renowned for the biological "glue" which he created to combine "severed nerves". In 1960 he won the Nobel Prize in Medicine together with Sir Mac Farlene Burnet for their discoveries in the field of immunity. After this, sir Medawar became the head of the teaching department at Birmingham, and then at University College, London. To sir Medawar, in teaching one should not try to transmit information, "but rather to guide thought and reading and encourage reflection". In 1962, he was given the position of the director of the National Institute for Medical Research. His experience in this institute led him to write his book "Advice To a Young Scientist". This is the kind of book sir Medawar would have liked to read before he became a scientific researcher. It includes issues about what a person needs to become a researcher. In 1966 sir Medawar was invited by AUB to give an address on the occasion of the centennial celebrations of the foundation of the university. Sir Medawar passed away in 1987 after having left a large collection of publications that deal with several topics in different domains. According to him, a human biologist must be a combination of "a demographer, geneticist, anthropologist, historian, psychologist and sociologist all in one; and no one can be all of these things. " Yet, sir Medawar was a human biologist. In his lecture on this occasion on February 22, 1967, Sir Medawar said: I want now to make a remark about English universities which may surprise you. We in England have very much less experience of general university education - I mean of the stadium generate - than is possessed by the United States or by Germany. Your great university here is one hundred years old. Very few universities in England are a hundred years old. . More than three hundred years ago Francis Bacon dreamed of a new state, a New Atlantis, a just and humane society of which the chief commodity of external trade was light- Bacon's own special light, the lumen siccum, the light of the understanding; a society dedicated to the 'effecting of all things possible'. I like the idea of a merchandise of light, of light as a commodity of trade. I think it is the idea that has animated all great educational adventures in the past - not least to the great educational adventure that led a hundred years ago to the foundation of this great university (AUB). |