The Limits of Science (Oxford Paperbacks)

by P. B. Medawar (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1986

  $3.40

  Written by the 1960 Nobel Prize winner in the field of immunology, this volume explores the nature and limitations of scientific pursuit. The three essays touch on some of mankind's greatest questions: Can science determine the existence of God? Is there one scientific method by which all the secrets of the universe can be discovered? The book aims to define the limits of science. The author's central purpose is to exculpate science from the reproach that it is quite unable to answer those ultimate questions that he shows to be beyond its explanatory competence. This charge, he argues, is no more sensible than to reproach a railway locomotive for not flying . But in spite of this he believes science to be a great and glorious enterprise - the most successful that human beings have ever engaged in. Peter Medawar is the author of Advice to a Young Scientist , Pluto's Republic , Memoir of a Thinking Radish and Aristotle to Zoos (with Jean Medawar).

• Used

  Paperback
  1988

  $3.40

  The self-deprecating image of man - an amalgam of Pascal's thinking reed and Falstaff's forked radish - that provides a title for Peter Medawar's autobiography stems from his belief that the professional lives of scientists usually make dull reading. Sir Peter Medawar is a scientist of world renown, a member of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the British Academy. He won a Nobel Prize in 1960 for work that formed the basis of modern immunology and organ transplantation. He also wrote a series of essays: Pluto's Republic , and two books: Advice to a young scientist and The limits of science . He was awarded the order of merit in 1981. He describes this autobiography, loosely modelled on Coleridge's Biographia Literaria , as a book of opinions which my life may be regarded as a pretext for holding . He covers his early years in Rio de Janeiro, Oxford in the 1930s, illness and recovery and his work in a wide variety of institutions around the world.