Of all scientific Nobel Prize-winners from the English-speaking world, the British zoologist Sir Peter Medawar (1915–87) is perhaps the most remarkable for wit and panache, as evidenced in his autobiography, Memoirs of a Thinking Radish (1986). In Pluto’s Republic (1982), from which this extract is taken, he does battle with several of his pet hates – psychoanalysts, mystical theologians, believers in ‘rhapsodical intellection’ and peddlers of paradoxes (‘a paradox’, wrote Medawar, ‘has the same significance for the logician as the smell of burning rubber has for the electronics engineer’). He (and Macfarlane Burnet) were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1961 for their work on immunological tolerance in mice, which showed for the first time that the problem of transplanting tissues from one individual to another was soluble, and so opened the way for transplant surgery.

No kind of prediction is more obviously mistaken or more dramatically falsified than that which declares that something which is possible in principle (that is, which does not flout some estabished scientific law) will never or can never happen. I shall choose now from my own subject, medical science, a bouquet of negative predictions chosen not so much for their absurdity as for the way in which they illustrate something interesting in the history of science or medicine.

My favourite prediction of this kind was made by J. S. Haldane (the distinguished physiologist father of the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane), who in a book published in 1930 titled The Philosophy of Biology declared it to be ‘inconceivable’ that there should exist a chemical compound having exactly the properties since shown to be possessed by deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). DNA is the giant molecule that encodes the genetic message which passes from one generation to the next – the message that prescribes how development is to proceed. The famous paper in the scientific journal Nature in which Francis Crick and James Watson described the structure of DNA and how that structure qualifies it to fulfil its genetic functions was published not so many years after Haldane’s unlucky prediction. The possibility that such a compound as DNA might exist had been clearly envisaged by the German nature-philosopher Richard Semon in a book The Mneme, a reading of which prompted Haldane to dismiss the whole idea as nonsense.

In the days before the introduction of antisepsis and asepsis, wound infection was so regular and so grave an accompaniment of surgical operations that we can hardly wonder at the declaration of a well-known surgeon working in London, Sir John Erichsen (1818–96), that ‘The abdomen is forever shut from the intrusions of the wise and humane surgeon.’ Of course, the coming of aseptic surgery to which I refer below, combined with the improvement of anaesthesia, soon made nonsense of this and opened the door to the great achievements of gastrointestinal surgery in the first decade of our century.

One of the very greatest surgeons of this period was Berkeley George Moynihan of Leeds (1865–1936), a man whose track-record for erroneous predictions puts him in a class entirely by himself.

Around 1900 the famous British periodical, the Strand magazine (the first to publish the case records of Sherlock Holmes), thought that at the turn of the century its readers would be interested to know what was in store for them in the century to come; ‘a Harley Street surgeon’ (unmistakably Moynihan) was accordingly invited to tell them what the future of surgery was to be. Evidently not spectacular, for Moynihan opined that surgery had reached its zenith and that no great advances were to be looked for in the future – nothing as dramatic, for example, as the opening of the abdomen, an event regarded with as much awe as the opening of Japan.

Moynihan’s forecast was not the hasty, ill-considered opinion of a busy man: it represented a firmly held conviction. In a Leeds University Medical School magazine in 1930 he wrote: ‘We can surely never hope to see the craft of surgery made much more perfect than it is today. We are at the end of a chapter.’ Moynihan repeated this almost word for word when he delivered Oxford University’s most prestigious lecture, the Romanes Lecture, in 1932. He was a vain and arrogant man, and if these quotations are anything to go by a rather silly one too, but surgery is indebted to him nevertheless, for he introduced the delicacy and fastidiousness of technique that did away for ever with the image of the surgeon as a brusque, over-confident and rough-and-ready sawbones. Moreover Moynihan, along with William Stewart Halsted of Johns Hopkins (1852–1922), introduced into modern surgery the aseptic technique with all the rituals and drills that go with it: the scrupulous scrub-up, the gown, cap and rubber gloves, and the facial mask over the top of which the pretty young theatre nurse gazes with smouldering eyes at the handsome young intern who is planning to wrong her. These innovations may be said to have made possible the hospital soap opera and thus in turn TV itself– for what would TV be without the hospital drama, and what would the hospital drama be without cap and masks and those long, meaningful stares?

The full regalia of the surgical operation did not escape a certain amount of gentle ridicule – in which we may hear the voice of those older, coarser surgeons whom Moynihan supplanted. Moynihan was once described as ‘the pyloric pierrot’, and upon seeing Moynihan’s rubber shoes a French surgeon is said to have remarked ‘Surely he does not intend to stand in the abdomen?’