One of Britain's most prominent scientists, Robert Winston, shares his controversial views on IVF, donor organs and nuclear power with Shane Hegarty
Prof Lord Robert Winston is the public face of science. A grin peeking out from behind a ragged moustache, big glasses, ties in various shades of brown. On television series such as Child of Our Time and The Human Body he has cut a reassuringly cliched figure. He is also the voice of science: it is so precisely avuncular that it might have been created by chemical equation.
Yet it's not how the gynaecologist, obstetrician and television star speaks that grabs the attention, so much as what he says. Give nuclear power a chance. Keep God out of embryo research. Fertility clinics should stop fixating on in vitro fertilisation (IVF).
From Monday, the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA), of which Prof Winston is the president, brings its annual Festival of Science to Dublin. It will feature 400 scientists, dozens of events and an address by a president unafraid of saying what he thinks.
Slouching on a sofa in the department of reproductive medicine in London's Hammersmith Hospital, he is clearly intent on avoiding the mistake he believes too many scientists have made. Next week, he will tell his colleagues that they need to start communicating better, that they need to trust the public if they want that trust to be reciprocated.
"I think that we've partly got ourselves to blame for the situation of mistrust, but of course technology is threatening by its very nature," he says. "And it has been since Roman times, the Middle Ages - it certainly was during the Industrial Revolution. And I think there's a need for scientists, if their work is to be trusted, to understand why people are threatened by technology and to try and respond to those worries."
He couldn't pick a more controversial example. The development of nuclear power, he says, has been stymied by this lack of understanding. The alternatives are unacceptable. Nuclear power, while expensive, is in his view "the safest technology for developing energy".
He knows that wouldn't be a particularly popular opinion in Ireland, and it isn't something many British politicians would say either.
"Unfortunately there's confusion over contained nuclear power and contained nuclear waste and nuclear explosions," he says. "And I think there's been a massive failure of governments to hold dialogue, to discuss, to try to educate. This is not a job for the scientists. But our plans for energy in Britain - 20 per cent renewable energy by the year 2020 - are almost certainly unattainable except at huge cost and will result in the wrecking of the environment in many parts of the country." Renewable energy he believes relies on the installation of devices which will be "rapidly obsolescent" from the moment they are established.
Nor does he believe that nuclear energy should be exclusive only to the self-appointed "wise countries". "We should be looking at disseminating that technology across the planet much more. Because it must be safer for the planet for Iran and China and India to be using nuclear power than it would to be using coal, which is highly polluting and very dangerous, causing irrevocable and irreversible damage to our environment. So, whilst I'm not denying that there are concerns about the disposal of nuclear waste," he adds, "I think those concerns to some extent are somewhat overplayed now." He insists that "more deaths resulted from Markham Main [ a Yorkshire colliery] than all the accidents and power stations put together, including Chernobyl."
ONE WOULD NEED a heavyweight reputation to feel comfortable making such bold statements. Prof Winston has that. A Labour peer since 1995, among colleagues he is renowned for his fertility research work. He founded the first NHS IVF programme during the 1980s; he conducted pioneering microtubal surgery on fallopian tubes, so improving many women's chances of getting pregnant.
He has been called the "Lord of Fertility", and is treated as a saviour by childless couples. Articles on him inevitably mention him as being a "God-like" talent. Sometimes they suggest that he might believe himself to be God-like.
He no longer treats patients. The frustrations of working within the NHS finally wore him down, he says. He misses it, though, and still responds to the letters and e-mails he receives from often desperate people seeking his advice. However, his work in treating the causes of infertility has only made him suspicious of a medical culture that looks to IVF rather than the underlying causes of infertility.
"IVF is a treatment that is grossly overused. It's overused and has a fundamental flaw, which is that it doesn't treat the underlying condition," he believes. "IVF in a sense is palliative." Fertility treatment and research in Ireland has had particular difficulties, he adds.
"Even in broadly liberal Dublin, IVF hasn't had an easy history. And Catholics have a view of the human embryo that frankly goes against most of our modern information. It seems to be highly implausible that you can see it as a person. It's very risky for a non-Irishman, even a non-Irishman like myself who has a huge respect for and love of the country which I go to often, but I think there's no doubt that Ireland has had some difficulties in broaching some of these ethical issues because of the power of the church.
"Now, I'm not anti-religious but I do believe that it's important for religions to promulgate truth and sometimes I fear that religious leaders give misguided and misleading information." They commentate on biological science "out of a sense of deep conviction, but not out of a knowledge of biology."
PROF WINSTON REMAINS engaged in research and is currently working on a way to transplant human genes into pigs so as to make their organs suitable for donation back to humans. Yet most people know him as a television presenter, and his programmes have sometimes had an impact beyond decent ratings. The Human Body, for instance, was the first programme to follow the course of a man's death. The public passing of Herbie, a German man living in Ireland, was an utterly justified taboo breaker, Prof Winston maintains. It was a sensitive and necessary final chapter to a series that began with birth and followed the natural life cycle. Only a few years on, though, Channel 4 feels comfortable broadcasting autopsies. Prof Winston is not impressed.
"I think they are watched mostly out of a sense of voyeurism. I don't believe that they are particularly educational. I don't think they really teach anatomy. They certainly don't teach about death. They don't teach about human relationships."
His long-running series, Child of Our Time, offers its own ethical dilemmas as it tracks annually the development of several children. There is, he admits, the real danger that a programme ostensibly observing their lives could affect them. So much so that ethicists were present at the most recent day of filming to see how the children, now six years old, were handling the situation.
"But of course we would have to intervene if we felt something serious was going wrong. We have actually intervened where we felt it would be helpful to families, where we felt it would be unethical not to do something more supportive for them." None of the families is paid, he points out, and they are inconvenienced by the filming. "But none have wanted to pull out."
If Prof Winston had his way, these children would grow up in a world that treats science as something more than a commodity. "One of my concerns about the government is that it sees science as a way of generating an economy and I think that is destructive. We don't learn Shakespeare or James Joyce in school because we believe it will increase the earnings from tourism, but somehow we're expected to study science because it's going to be financially advantageous. We have to regard science as part of our culture."
For tickets and information on the
British Association Festival of Science, contact the Temple Bar Information Centre, 12 East Essex Street, Dublin. See also
www.the-ba.net/festivalofscience