This year's Reith lecturer is the Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at University College London, Peter Brian Medawar. His work on graft rejection and the discovery of acquired immune tolerance has been fundamental to the practice of tissue and organ transplants. He is the former Mason Professor of Zoology at Birmingham University, and was the Croonian Lecturer for the Royal Society in 1958. In his Reith lecture series entitled 'The Future of Man', Professor Medawar considers how humans will continue to evolve in the future.

In his first lecture entitled 'The Fallibility of Prediction', he considers the evolutionary forces acting on humans today. He considers the fertility, birth ratio and typical family size in order to understand the creation of our population, and explores how to predict and regulate our population. Show less