Sir Peter Medawar
- Born
- 28 February 1915
- Died
- 2 October 1987 (age 72)
His involvement with transplant research started in the Second World War when he investigated improvements in skin grafts and why the skin taken from one person would not form a permanent graft on the skin of another person. He recognised that graft rejection was an immunological response, and established theorems of transplant immunity which formed the basis for his future work.
his research has saved countless lives
By experimenting on mice, Medawar showed that although each animal cell contained antigens that were important for immunity, tolerance could be acquired if the recipient was injected as an embryo with donor cells. The recipient would then accept tissue from all parts of the donor’s body. This work became more focused in 1949 when Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet hypothesised that cells embryos, and babies immediately after birth, became able to distinguish between their own tissue substances and foreign material.
After the war, Medawar moved to Birmingham and worked with Rupert Billingham. They studied the use of skin grafting to distinguish between monozygotyic and dizygotic twins in cattle, which showed that antigens leaked from the yolk sac of one embryo twin into the other. They concluded that the phenomen which they called ‘actively acquired tolerance’ could be artificially reproduced. When Medawar moved to London he continued to work on this with both Billingham and Leslie Brent.
A key step in clinical transplantation was the recognition by the three men that it was possible to induce chimerism-associated neonatal tolerance deliberately. This discovery eventually led to the first successful bone marrow transplantations in humans in 1968 and it established the new field of transplantation biology.
Medawar won the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, for the discovery of acquired immunological tolerance. Medawar divided the Nobel Prize money between himself, Bilingham and Brent.
In 1962 he was appointed director of the National Institute for Medical Research in London. At the age of 54 he suffered a debilitating stroke, while reading a lesson at Exeter Cathedral for the British Science Association’s annual meeting, but continued to have an active life in science.