The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1960 was announced on 20 October, while Peter Medawar was at work in his college’s Zoology Experimental Laboratory. He said that the prize was a delightful surprise, almost a shock: “somehow one never thinks of oneself as likely to be so honoured”. Medawar went on to pay tribute to two other research workers in his laboratory who helped him in his efforts to discover what causes human tissues to be rejected by their new host on which they are grafted.