IN 1951, four years after being made dean and professor at the University of Birmingham, Peter was invited to submit his name for the Jodrell Chair of Zoology at the University of London. It was the longest established chair of zoology in England, carrying great prestige.
He applied and was elected. His partner, Bill Billingham, who had pioneered the work on the cattle twins with him, was willing to move to London to continue the research they were doing. So a new chapter in all their lives was about to begin.
The move promised to be complicated; the Medawars now had a large family, not just of pets and children but also of parents and in-laws who visited often. Jean was worried about finding a suitable house with space for everyone. One morning, while she was folding a sheet of The Times to line a drawer, she saw an ad: Queen Anne–period house with garden in Hampstead. Immediately she got on the train to London, saw the house—four floors near the underground rail line to the University of London and to the 880 acres of Hampstead Heath. Instantly, she made an offer. Then she went home and sold their car to afford it. For the next year, she and Peter were carless, but the house was worth it. And they were now settled in London.
Peter’s talent for administration was unexpected, though he vowed never to let it get in the way of his science. By gathering stimulating colleagues around him, he created what he called a “matey” feeling, an atmosphere he felt was essential to fruitful research. No time was wasted in rivalry or intrigue. Authors’ names on published material were arranged alphabetically, not by precedence. Colleagues played squash together. They spent time in pubs debating ideas.
Peter took up smoking. He also bore down on his important research, which he jokingly called the “period of the supermice.” He reproduced what he had observed in the cattle twins by performing a simple operation that did not interfere with gestation. Through the body wall of a brown mouse female, he delicately injected her embryos with living cells from one of the white mice. Peter and his colleagues eventually found the right dose of these “foreign non-self” cells, as well as their right state of development, that allowed the mouse embryo to accept them.
As adults, those mice were then given skin grafts from mice of the opposite color. After trial and error, Peter finally had a population of living mice running around in solid-colored fur interrupted with an opposite-colored patch. The normal time span of transplanted tissue, ten to twelve days, came and went. No rejection. He had produced the tolerance he had witnessed in the twin cattle. Exposing unborn mice to the foreign cells of another so early in life “fooled” them into accepting these transplanted cells as “self.”
The mice families lived in big, round glass containers with sawdust bottoms and a perforated lid at Peter’s lab at the university. He liked to watch them, finding them much more intelligent than most humans think. He saw how they learned to stand on their hind legs to dislodge the lid and compromise the security Peter had counted on.
By then, a pack of street mice had found a hole in the laboratory floorboards and moved in, living as squatters, until one of the priceless laboratory mice sprang from his container and disappeared down the street-mice hole. Hearing squeaks, scuffles, and flopping, Peter knew a terrific battle was underway. All he could do was hope for the best and root for his mouse with its multicolored coat.
After a few minutes, his valuable research mouse crawled up through the hole. It stood panting with a torn ear before collapsing. Peter said it breathed its last as a hero to science.
These studies demonstrated that the immune system could indeed be manipulated prior to birth, but Peter knew he had to duplicate the study in another animal model. He decided to repeat the work of Milan Hašek, the gifted Czechoslovakian biologist. Hašek had accomplished a union between two chicken embryos and found that the chicken twins hatched from this union were tolerant of each other’s red blood cells. Soon, Peter had his own second-generation chimeric chickens—artificially produced twin chicks—strutting around his lab, carrying healthy living tissues from chicks that were genetically different. And no chicken had ill effects or obvious signs of being altered before birth.
By duplicating Hašek’s findings, Peter added to his body of work. For years, he had carefully and clearly displayed the workings of the immune system. He was nearly ready to publish his groundbreaking research, which he would call the beauty and wonder of science.
His findings had yielded two brilliant discoveries. First, the second set phenomenon: the body’s ability to recognize a second invasion of a protein with greater vigor than the first introduction of a foreign protein—a discovery that applied to all vertebrates such as birds, mammals, and primates. The other was his brilliant study in manipulating embryos prior to birth, proving that the immunological barrier could indeed be broken. He had shown there was a privileged time for the transplantation of a foreign tissue. The commingling of fluids between two unborn organisms led to their being able to accept, as adults, each other’s foreign tissues with no rejection. Pre-birth manipulation equipped an organism to recognize transplanted tissue as “self.”
The challenge now for Joe and Franny would be to apply this basic science to human biology.
IN THE UNITED STATES, the Rockefeller Institute, as the foremost center for biomedical research in the world, sought brilliant scientists to spend time in America to exchange ideas. Peter’s eminence in immunology was now such that the institute invited him to give a series of lectures at Harvard. He came to the United States for the first time in September 1949. As soon as he walked off the ocean liner SS Mauretania, he stood on a New York City street and looked up. The height of the buildings astonished him. Coming from Britain, still in the midst of postwar austerity, he was even more impressed by the display of American wealth.
Peter also realized that it was “not a good moment in American history.” The country was in the throes of the anti-intellectual fervor spawned by the speeches of Senator Joseph McCarthy. By the time of Peter’s visit, all areas of American life were suspected of being infiltrated by communists. When Peter applied for a visa at the American consulate in London and was asked if he had any intentions of overthrowing the constitution of the United States, he answered with an Oxford man’s cheekiness: he had no such purpose, but “if I were to do it by mistake I should be inexpressively contrite.”
Fortunately, he was admitted anyway.
Mesmerized by automats and their remarkable ability to spew out an inexpensive meal, Peter ate in them all the time, saving enough money to send for Jean, who traveled over on the Queen Mary, fell out of her bed during a storm, and considered it all great fun.
Peter met her at the dock and rushed her to Rockefeller Center, which disappeared into the clouds. She bent her head back to spy the tip, sending her sealskin hat to the sidewalk. As soon as it was back on, Peter rushed her to witness the miracle of an automat.
Even though Cold War tactics were beginning to affect the international scientific community, Peter continued working without intellectual constraint. Fortunately, too, the clamp on academic freedom for those behind the Iron Curtain had not yet stopped the burgeoning field of immunology. Scientists were crying out for new data, new technologies, and a fresh point of view.
Peter was ready to provide that point of view. Building on prior research, he was refashioning past knowledge into a new world of science, reinvigorated by what had been learned from treating war wounds. Funding from the United States and from private foundations was flowing to British scientists. He often said that being a scientist felt like being “born anew every morning.” And once he confided to a colleague, “My mind, you know, never lets me rest.” To which his colleague quickly added, “or anyone else.”
At the age of only thirty-four, he was visiting America as a foremost thinker in an increasingly clear universe of science that had always been a foggy, confusing puzzle. In the Harvard lecture hall that September, he paced up and down the stage, using almost no notes. He described his scientific studies as if recounting a game’s sudden-death playoff. His audience of scientists was virtually hypnotized by his skill at turning dry academic information into the stuff of riveting mystery.
His life’s first great challenge, he liked to say, was overcoming the worldview of his nanny, Winnie, who each Sunday read to him any newspaper articles that recounted the week’s rapes, murders, batteries, arsons, and marital infidelities in high places. By the time he was twelve, he needed an antidote.
Love, the great remedy for what he called pubescent dyspepsia, saved him. And it came in the form of a stack of records from the golden age of opera in his parents’ living room. He would put one of their records on their windup gramophone with its seven-foot horn, turn up the volume, and blast Madame Butterfly to the ceiling. Listening, his heart grew warm, and his enthusiasm for life, which nanny Winnie had nearly decapitated, returned. From then on, each week he saved his money to buy another record to rush home and play. His love for the dramatic was born.
As opera drew out emotions he didn’t even know he had, he began memorizing songs from his favorites. His standards were from Il Trovatore and Madame Butterfly, which he sang, even though he could not sing. Later, as a student at his English public school, he found a classmate, John Vincent Godefroy, who shared his love. Though he owned the barrel chest of a baritone, Godefroy would let loose in a penetrating falsetto. He and Peter memorized parts of Aida and sang them to the horror of their classmates. Later, when one of these listeners was a student at Cambridge, he said that hearing the Medawar-Godefroy duo was one of the most terrible experiences he had ever lived through. Digesting the criticism, Peter said, “Well, you can’t please everybody,” and transferred his opera-singing to the shower.
While courting Jean, he introduced her to his favorite records, and after their marriage, while they listened to the sounds coming from the long golden horn of the gramophone or the stage of a concert hall, he would grip her fingers so tightly that her wedding ring left imprints. Jean silently watched as tears ran down his face. On occasion, he even sobbed.
On stage, describing his work, his flair for the dramatic took flight. His passion and dedication to the beauty of science and its quest for truth were riveting. He delivered ideas for new medical treatments with a unique ability to melt the barriers between basic scientists and clinicians. He described his studies clearly, almost like scientific recipes. Hearing him, scientists couldn’t wait to get home and get started on their own ideas.
He made it clear in those American lectures that, with regard to the immune system, one simple concept needed to be understood, accepted, and employed, especially in the dream factory of transplantation that was spreading around the medical world. He emphasized the imperative understanding that the immune system had a memory—that our bodies rack up memories at a cellular level. Furthermore, it was a biological memory set up to rarely, if ever, fail. He liked to demonstrate the problem that the immune system presented to transplantation by saying, simply, that the body could not discern its friends from its enemies.
He proposed the question that if rejection was an allergic or immunological process, then couldn’t it also be manipulated? And, if so, shouldn’t organ tissue, such as a kidney, be able to be transplanted to save unimagined numbers of lives? All that was needed were those central missing answers: how does one manipulate the immune system? How does one prevent damage to an organ as it is taken from one to be given to another? How does one surgically place it and attach the vessels?
The puzzle pieces were ready to fall into place.