"Nobel Prize in Medicine" Peter Medawar Hand Signed 2X4 Card JG Autographs COA

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Up for auction the
"Nobel Prize in Medicine" Peter Medawar Hand Signed 2X4 Card.
This item is certified authentic by JG Autographs and comes with their Certificate of Authenticity.
ES-4940
Sir Peter Brian Medawar
OM
CBE
FRS
(
/ˈmɛdəwər/
; 28 February 1915 – 2 October 1987) was a British biologist and writer, whose works on
graft rejection
and the discovery of
acquired immune tolerance
were fundamental to the medical practice of tissue and
organ transplants
. For his scientific works he is regarded as the "father of transplantation". He is remembered for his wit both in person and in popular writings. Famous zoologists such as
Richard Dawkins
referred to him as "the wittiest of all scientific writers", and
Stephen Jay Gould
as "the cleverest man I have ever known".
Medawar was the youngest child of a
Lebanese
father and a British mother, and was both a Brazilian and British citizen by birth. He studied at
Marlborough College
and
Magdalen College, Oxford
and was professor of zoology at the
University of Birmingham
and
University College London
. Until he was partially disabled by a
cerebral infarction
, he was Director of the
National Institute for Medical Research
at
Mill Hill
. With his doctoral student
Leslie Brent
and
postdoctoral fellow
Rupert E. Billingham
, he demonstrated the principle of acquired immunological tolerance (the phenomenon of unresponsiveness of the immune system to certain molecules), which was theoretically predicted by Sir
Frank Macfarlane Burnet
. This became the foundation of tissue and organ transplantation. He and Burnet shared the 1960
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
"for discovery of acquired immunological tolerance".
Medawar was born in
Petrópolis
, a town 40 miles north of
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
, where his parents were living. He was the third child of
Lebanese
Nicholas Agnatius Medawar, born in the village of
Jounieh
, north of
Beirut
,
Lebanon
and British mother Edith Muriel (née Dowling). He had a brother Philip and a sister Pamela. (Pamela was later married to Sir
David Hunt
, who served as Private Secretary to prime ministers
Clement Attlee
and
Winston Churchill
.) His father, a
Christian Maronite
, became a naturalised British citizen and worked for a British dental supplies manufacturer that sent him to Brazil as an agent. (He later described his father's profession as selling "false teeth in South America".) His status as a British citizen was acquired at birth, as he said, "My birth was registered at the British
Consulate
in good time to acquire the status of 'natural-born British subject'."
Medawar left Brazil with his family for England "towards the end of the war", and he lived there for the rest of his life. He was also a Brazilian citizen by birth, as dictated by the
Brazilian nationality law
(
jus soli
). At 18 years, when he was of age to be drafted in the Brazilian Army, he applied for exemption of
military conscription
to
Joaquim Pedro Salgado Filho
, his godfather and the then Minister of Aviation. His application was denied by General
Eurico Gaspar Dutra
, and had to renounce the citizenship.
In 1928, Medawar went to
Marlborough College
in Marlborough, Wiltshire. He hated the college because "they were critical and querulous at the same time, wondering what kind of person a Lebanese was—something foreign you can be sure". And also because of its preference on sports, in which he was weak. An experience of bullying and racism made him feel the rest of his life "resentful and disgusted at the manners and mores of [Marlborough's] essentially tribal institution," and likened it to the training schools for the Nazi SS as all "founded upon the twin pillars of sex and sadism." His proudest moments at the college were with his teacher
Ashley Gordon Lowndes
, to whom he credited the beginning of his career in biology. He recognised Lowndes as barely literate but "a very, very good biology teacher". Lowndes had taught eminent biologists including
John Z. Young
and Richard Julius Pumphrey. Yet Medawar was inherently weak in dissection and was constantly irked by their dictum: "Bloody foolish is the boy whose drawing of his dissection differs in any way whatsoever from the diagram in the textbook."
In 1932, he went on to
Magdalen College, Oxford
, graduating with a first-class honours degree in zoology in 1935. Medawar was appointed Christopher Welch scholar and senior
demy
of Magdalen in 1935. He also worked at the
Sir William Dunn School of Pathology
supervised by
Howard Florey
(later Nobel laureate, and who inspired him to take up immunology) and completed his doctoral thesis in 1941. In 1938, he became Fellow of Magdalene through an examination. It was there that he started working with J. Z. Young on the regeneration of nerves. His invention of a nerve glue proved useful in surgical operations of severed nerves during the World War II.