tried to offer in this lecture. MEDAWAR But we mustn’t leap from denial to despair. So I give the last word to another sage: the eloquent biologist Peter Medawar: “The bells that toll for mankind are ............. like the bells of Alpine cattle. They are attached to our own necks, and it must be our fault i

XT STEP, A NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE? In a 1968 book review of THE DOUBLE HELIX, anthologised in PLUTO'S REPUBLIC, the distinguished biologist Sir Peter Medawar wrote that if a young man as talented as Jim Watson had been born British, especially in the Cambridge of his and Crick's time, he would have been