Memoir of a Thinking Radish

Impaired physically since suffering a stroke in the early 1970s, Sir Peter has sustained the mental brilliance and liveliness that distinguished him at his peak as a world-renowned immunologist, winner of the 1960 Nobel Prize for medicine, as is evident in this absorbing, unpretentious autobiography. Sir Peter was born in Rio in 1915, son of a Lebanese merchant and a British woman who came to be known as ""Granny Moo.'' He spent a typically upper class British boyhood in public schools before moving on as a medical research student whose specialty, when World II broke out, was skin grafts. Sir Peter's anecdote-rich story of his rise as immunologist and administrator in Birmingham and at University College in London sheds only limited light on Britain's academic world, but in closing chapters his discussion of his recent involvement in cancer research is enlightening. His tribute to his wife Jean is touching, and his humorretinol is toxic ``as everyone knows who makes a habit of feasting intemperately off the livers of polar bears''is delightfully dry. (May)