The scientific approach
Robert Winston with photos of some of the many children born thanks to his work in IVF.
Professor Lord Robert Winston, although he would be horrifi ed to be referred to by what he calls his ‘pompous’ title, is about the closest you can get to the 21st century Renaissance man. The world’s only fertility expert to have become a household name, Robert Winston pioneered IVF treatment, is life-peer of the House of Lords, Chancellor elect of Sheffi eld University and author of several books.
He is also a successful TV presenter for numerous ground-breaking documentaries such as Walking with Cavemen, Superhuman, Human Instinct and The Human Mind. As testimony to his multi-faceted career, the range of people that turned up to his talk was incredible.
No one else would be asked so many questions by people ranging from religious fi gures to biologists; from first year PPEists, earnestly questioning him on determinism to the gaggle of increasingly disgruntled animal rights activists, ranting about vivisection. Winston, though he looked rather worn, did not seem at all phased by his tough audience: “Really? Maybe I was half asleep, I didn’t really notice,” he smoothly comments.
The belligerence of the activists had not gone unnoticed however - without prompting he adds spiritedly, “I don’t know why animal rights activists try and heckle speakers, I don’t know what they feel they are going to achieve.
What I think they’ll fi nd again and again is that there is virtually no support for the views they’re holding and if they bothered to listen for a bit they’d begin to realise that actually, whilst of course they are making a perfectly valid point, it is not a view shared by most people.” Robert Winston is, at the risk of cliché, a mass of contradictions. The seriousness with which he talks about his views belies his quirky, almost cartoon like appearance.
Although a bushy moustache and wispy hair give him the look of the stereotypical ‘crazy scientist’, forever engaged in hair-brained, explosive experiments, he is clearly a highly thoughtful, moralistic man. He is also, without a doubt, a natural performer;. Even when irritated by the protesters, he delivers his answers in the considered, self-aware, slightly rhetorical manner of a man who is used to engaging with an audience.
One cannot help but suspect that this distinctive image is deliberately cultivated. After all, any fertility expert who achieves widespread fame (and in 1995 Robert Winston was ranked above Delia Smith in household names), must be master of the publicity stunt. He does however, look utterly aghast when I ask him whether he really did put his own sperm under a microscope for TV: “Oh I didn’t, I didn’t,” he replied, rather fl ustered.
“It was just rice water and then we changed the shot to sperm which were human but weren’t my sperm really.” But before you dismiss him as another TV fraud, he did genuinely get drunk live on TV for a documentary on the effects of alcohol. “I drank two and half bottles of wine during that sequence in front of the camera and I was fairly… well, gone,” he explains, leaning forward conspiratorially.
“It was one of the most diffi cult things I’ve done, drinking on your own like that to get drunk is not an easy thing to do. I thought it was quite a great thing to do actually.” “TV is a great art form,” Winston suggests, and it seems that he has mastered it. But for all his attentiongrabbing tactics, he is far more than the typical TV ‘token scientist’, occasionally thrown in for good measure in sensationalist documentaries.
His television career is driven by a sense of moral purpose and his tone turns suddenly serious when he explains the motivation behind his onscreen success. “We live in a deeply science- suspicious environment, which is dangerous to us. I think we need to understand science and I think that writing books like this [his most recent book, the Story of God] and television programmes of the sort that I do is helpful to promulgate scientific views.
The impression is that scientists don’t think in terms of scientific spirituality, and I think that a big problem facing us in the West is a growing distrust of science. You see it in the issues of nuclear waste, nuclear power, the measles vaccine and the whole range of issues surrounding cloning. There’s a kind of idea of shock horror; the scientists are manipulating us.
Winston would understand better than most the effects of a distrust of science; through pioneering IVF treatment he allowed human embryos to be screened for genetic disorders, sparking fears that he was ‘playing God’. Interestingly, Winston is more than willing to meet this concern head-on, revealing the dedication and determination that clearly provided a driving force to his career. “I think that ‘playing God’ is the greatest compliment that a person can ever be given.
It means that you are imitating God, which is in Christian and Jewish religion a very important thing to be doing. Imitating God means essentially trying to do something for the good of mankind in an ethical fashion. So, if you ask me if I play God with IVF, yeah sure, I play God with IVF and so do I when I take an antibiotic; not to sit there and die of an infection when you can treat it with a chemical. Is that playing God? Yeah sure that’s playing God”.
At first glance his impassioned stance seems symptomatic of the “rigid views of some scientists” that he is so anxiously trying to counter-balance. However, speaking to Winston, one cannot help but feel that he is somehow set in a different mould from other scientists who express such radical views. Although he happily plays with fi re, he seems terrifi ed of getting burnt.
He is fully aware of the powerful tool he wields, and he speaks with genuine fear when he says that, “Science is dangerous, particularly when science doesn’t prove, and it’s a misunderstanding of science to believe that it does…I think that [this belief] is dangerous because it provides a perfectly reasonable environment for a radical attack on science. If you call religion the virus of the mind, you are attacking a great number of people’s perfectly reasonable views of the universe.
Science is never about absolute answers, it doesn’t provide absolute answers, neither does religion. In religion, certainty has produced the crusades, produced extremism. Produced suicide bombers to some extent”. Robert Winston is an Orthodox Jew and it seems that for him science and religion are permanently intertwined. In fact, he is adamant that religion will continue to play a huge role in the human experience.
Otherwise, “We’d have to believe that at some point we will live in a perfectly rational world in which everyone is governed entirely rationally and I don’t think that will ever happen.” As seems typical to his character, when faced with big questions such as the existence of God, Winston doesn’t shy away from controversy but faces it straight on. His new book, The Story of God, explores the relationship between science and religion.
“I suppose this book is essentially about uncomfortable questions. Answering that you believe in God is particularly uncomfortable; it sounds as though you’re completely irrational and have got no ability to think properly, it sounds as if you’re being woolly. If you say you don’t believe in God, believers can say you’re being unethical and hard and have no humanity about you.” There is also an impression of urgency in Winston’s decision to write such a book.
The tumultuous state of current affairs is obviously weighing heavily on the mind of this politically aware and benevolent man. “I think that there is a revolution going on in both science and religion at the moment, which is massive. The revolution going on in religion can be seen by the complete change in views and religious attitudes.
People generally don’t belong to an established church, yet they still profess some kind of spiritual view and, at the same time, religion plays a huge part in current affairs. Religion is extremely important. Science is going through a revolution because it has begun to believe that it isn’t about certainty; quantum physics shows physically that we have things that are completely inexplicable.
The passion with which Winston delivers this speech, the dedication he shows towards both religion and science, is breathtaking and quite contagious. He delivers the message for young scientists today that, “You do the most exciting course that is in your limit. You have the possibility to do things that will change our views of the natural world. Use that power with responsibility.” Even I, with my lifelong phobia for the science lab, am caught up in his enthusiasm.
Winston may be hard to pin down, he is a man who in his appearance tries to conform to the ‘scientist’ stereotype, yet at the same time is desperate to break that stereotype down, a man terrifi ed of certainty, yet unwavering in his cause, a devout Jew who every day is attacked by fellow believers for ’playing God’.
However, he is also a man who built a career around creating life and one would be hard pressed to fi nd anyone with such an intense concern for humanity, so even if one is taken aback by his apparently self-contradictory stance on so many subjects. Ultimately though, there’s one thing anyone who’s spoken to the man can tell you: Robert Winston is almost impossible to dislike.
3rd Nov 2005