P.D. Medawar (1915–1987) was a British biologist whose research was fundamental to the development of tissue and organ transplants. Along with Frank Macfarlane Burnet, he was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
In a work that is still regarded as a classic of clarity of writing and astuteness of observation, James Parkinson (1775-1824) was the first to describe “an evil from the domination of which the victim had no prospect of escape.” This was paralysis agitans, the shaking palsy that Charcot renamed …
Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process
by Charles J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson
“This book contains the first attempt to trace development all the way from genes through the mind to culture.” The authors’ illusion that this is so is owing at least in part to their neglect or ignorance of the thought of many others who have attempted to arrive at a …
The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
by Stephen Jay Gould
The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology
edited by Ernst Mayr, edited by William Provine
When I reviewed Stephen Jay Gould’s admirable Ever Since Darwin a few years ago, I expressed the hope that he would not lay his pen aside for too long. I need not have worried, for Gould is a natural writer: he has something to say and the inclination and skill …
I was once visited by a science writer who told me in a state of some excitement of a notion to which he attached great importance: suppose a brain to be transplanted from one person to another; would not the new identity of the recipient of the graft raise perplexing, …
The angle of vision from a Chair of Social Medicine such as Thomas McKeown occupied with distinction for many years in the University of Birmingham, England, is quite different from that of a physician at the bedside or a surgeon at the operating table. The difference is embodied in the …