For
reasons that rather escape me --- since I have minimal interest in science or
scientists --- I am reading the autobiography of Sir Peter Medawar, who, born
in 1915, was brought up in Rio de Janeiro by a Lebanese father, educated at a
British public school and Oxford, and became a leading scientist during the
Second World War, winning the Nobel Prize “for medicine or physiology” in 1960.
The book is rather a strange one. It has three extremely
lively opening chapters, one of which contains the best description I have ever
read of the virtues of Oxford’s tutorial system of education --- one tutor to
one pupil --- which I couldn’t help contrasting with what I read last week
about Toronto University with its 90,000 students. 90,000! When last I had heard about them, they were 40,000
and I had thought that huge number. After
these three delightful chapters he gets on to describing what he calls his “Early
Research”. And it is here that as far as I am concerned the man could be
writing in some foreign language of which I understand not a word.
Under the direction of men who have become famous figures in
the history of science, Medawar began as a zoologist, and thereafter successively describes himself as a tissue-culturist, working under a professor of pathology, and rooming with “a
fellow-embryologist” who was studying the domestic fowl. In the succeeding
pages he appears to have plunged into a bewildering variety of disciplines ---
medicine, and various branches of biology among them, and of some of which one
has the impression they were just emerging to stake their claim as a separate
discipline --- immunology, genetics, transplantation,
various divisions of biochemistry, all of these just then breaking down into
minuscule specialties that for all I
know, have probably since been developed
into full-scale fields of study in their own right.
Halfway through this bewildering recitation of mysteries he
pauses to give a delightfully off-hand account of the 22 honorary doctorates he
has won around the world, three of them in Canada, along with delightful anecdotes
of the odd behaviour of what he calls his fellow graduands --- a new word on me, like many
others in his book. These include the sculptor Henry Moore, who, when Medawar
asked him if he would say a few words to the populace on behalf of his fellow
honorees, “turned fully round towards me, with his blue eyes blazing, ‘No, I
bloody well would not,’ he said in strong Yorkshire, so I did not have to press
the matter further.” On another occasion
he attended in a wheelchair, and Mother Teresa, “seeing this rather touching
spectacle, walked over to me, and without further ado blessed me, not at all
perfunctorily but in the deeply earnest way that I believe to be characteristic
of her.” When Medawar told Tennessee Williams, also present, what the saint-like woman had done for him,
and inquired what he, Mr. Williams was going to do for him, the author
responded, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you. I’ll get you a drink.” It was
already clear to all, comments Medawar gently,
“that Mr. Williams had fully mastered whatever feat had been necessary
to secure drinks. When he had fulfilled his offer my wife drank at least half,
which was only right.”
Another scientist said on the book cover that “nobody can
match Medawar for verbal wit and dexterity,” which explains why I was ready to
lay out the 50 cents it cost me to procure the volume. The man, between
incomprehensible chapters of scientific jargon, can really write. Ever since I
began to write for a living in 1945 I have been working at trying to express
myself clearly, and it is always infuriating when one comes across some
numbskull from some other discipline who evidently can write clearly without
even having to work at it.
I relation to this, Medawar on page 64 explodes one of the
myths I have lived by all these years. I have always named Bertrand Russell as
my primary model in writing, because, I have told people endlessly, “He can
make any subject comprehensible to any reader.”
Oh, yeah! Medawar writes of his delight in finding a book by
Bertrand Russell “a man whom I had known only as an essayist and popular
philosopher” (such a silky put-down, eh?), a book called Principles of Mathematics, of which “I still remember the first paragraph.
He thereupon quotes said paragraph:
“Pure mathematics is the class of all propostions of the form ‘p implies q where p and q are propositions
containing one or more variables, the same in the two propositions, and neither
p nor q contains any constants except logical constants. And logical
constants are all notions definable in rerms of the following: Implication, the
relation of a term to a class of which it is a member, the notion of such that, the notion of relation, and
such further notions as may be involved in the general notion of propositions
of the above form. In addition to these, mathematics uses a notion which is not a constituent of the propositions which
it considers, namely, the notion of truth.”
Okay, I take it all back. Bertrand Russell cannot
explain any subject so clearly that it will
be comprehensible to everyone. And all these years I have been falsely dining
out, claiming a connection to him that exposes me as a fraud and a fake.
Of course,
there’s always Shakespeare, with his wonderful use of concrete, short, snappy words
and and common man’s language…..I’ll stick to him in future.
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