Bill Parry

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.50.21

I was just nine years old in 1978, the year Professor Robert Winston and his team created the world’s first ‘test-tube baby’. Twenty-four years later, over a million test-tube babies have been born and I am sitting in Winston’s office, surrounded by a collage of hundreds of photographs of children, children, children: mostly newborns, some minuscule in incubators, several smiling toddlers, and some now as spotty teenagers – all of whom would not be here if Robert Winston had not had a hand in their conceptions.

Moments later, I am led to his other office, this one in a slick, modern and much brighter building. Professor Winston soon appears, well-tanned but looking a tad vexed behind his trade- mark glasses and moustache. He shakes my hand then hurriedly runs through his gruelling schedule with his PA.

When it’s my turn, he apologises if he seems distracted and irked, which he clearly is: he has to fly to the States the next day to give a talk and his laptop has crashed. On it is the only copy of his talk, he explains, and he still has a hideously crammed schedule to get through today.

I thus drop the question about his views on the new company set up to provide sperm for lesbian couples, Man Not Included. Instead, I ask what advice he has for undergraduates thinking about embarking on an academic career in research, given problems with relatively poor stipends and salaries, funding, short-term contracts and a poor career structure.

‘I think the prospect for young scientists isn’t that bad. If you went round this laboratory, where there are 24 young scientists on this floor, most of them female, I think most of them are engaged and excited by what they’re doing and not depressed at all. I think they feel very vibrant, actually. There are major problems within the universities because they’re not properly funded, but there are some indications that the government is taking that on board.

‘It’s not the PhDs and the young scientists who are depressed,’ he adds. ‘I’d say it’s the senior ones. The environment that they’re having to administer is a difficult one,’ Winston says, adding optimistically: ‘But that will change, I suspect.’

On his bookshelf is a card, a detail of Michelangelo’s The creation of Adam. It seems particularly apt in Winston’s office. Many ask whether he feels like God, bringing life into the world, a comparison he dislikes.

‘No. I don’t believe that I’m a creator of life. I’m merely an agent that helps life into the world a bit. I think reproductive physicians who start thinking of themselves in grandiose terms – and I think some of my colleagues do – are likely to do a disservice to themselves and to their patients.

‘What this subject ought to show very clearly clinically to its practitioners is how fallible we are. There- fore, above all, there should be a sense of humility about it, because most of the time we find we aren’t actually helping. It’s a difficult technology which doesn’t work an awful lot of the time, and that ought to keep us more humble than we sometimes are.’

It certainly is a difficult technology. According to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), IVF success rates for 2000/2001 averaged 25.1% for women aged under 38 and 21.8% for those aged 38 and older. Still when you compare that to Nature’s own surprisingly low success rate, which averages about 15%, it is no wonder that some regard his work as god-like.

Obviously, successful cases bring much ‘personal satisfaction’ to Winston, but he stresses that unsuccessful cases have their own particular and important value as well.

‘One can get a tremendous amount of satisfaction from helping people through failure. A lot of my work is actually doing that – knowing one’s limitations, trying to persuade people not to go through treatment, trying to help them to take that decision. Trying to make that a positive experience can be the most challenging aspect of reproductive technology therapy. It can be very, very rewarding and can be immensely beneficial to the couples themselves. One shouldn’t overlook that, I think it’s very significant.’

Science and communication

As is apparent through his television programmes and his work in the House of Lords, Winston is strongly committed to improving communication between scientists, politicians and the public. While he feels that scientists are taking positive steps in engaging more with the public, he believes that more effective methods should be embraced more often.

‘I think that scientists are still a bit dismissive of the more popular approaches to science. They still think in a very cerebral fashion about science, they still express themselves very cerebrally and they still are rather dismissive of, for example, trying to do things on BBC 1 or writing columns in The Sun. In my mind, that’s almost the most important end because that’s going to get to the biggest public, it’s going to get to the people who actually are important. A BBC 1 television programme that’s watched by five million people should be as just as valuable as writing an esoteric book that sells 3000 or 4000 copies but is extremely well written and wins a non- fiction prize.’

The public’s distrust of scientists has remained fairly constant for years. Issues such as the BSE scandal, the foot- and-mouth epidemic, concerns over the use of animals in medical research, GMOs, and the ongoing debate about the MMR vaccine have recently fed this distrust. Winston feels that this distrust is largely the scientific community’s own doing.

‘More scientists are engaging a bit better than they did, but we still tend to present ourselves as being very certain, whereas science is about uncertainty. We still are not prepared to really understand why members
of the public have difficulty with issues such as the perception of risk. I think there’s more to be done with the science environment than with the public environment. We still talk about the “public understanding of science” when it should be the scientists’ understanding of the public that’s the real issue.’

Winston said in a recent interview that ‘transgenic humans’ was ‘the real debate’ that needed to be debated. When I ask him to elaborate, he dismisses that specific comment, but points out that the entire GM issue is one that needs to be discussed and communicated more effectively.

‘We’re not handling the issues of GM in general very well. I don’t just mean in humans, but in general. I think there’s a huge misunderstanding about how it can be controlled, the relative good it can do, and so on. I think transgenic technology has already offered a great deal to human and animal biology, and could offer a great deal more. But if it’s not really under- stood, then I think that’s another example of an area where there needs to be better communication.’

Science and the media

When I ask how well the British media is reporting science issues responsibly, a long, thoughtful pause indicates his ambivalent feelings. While he extols several broadsheet science journalists, and science writers such as Steve Jones, he excoriates much of the rest.

‘It’s extraordinarily variable,’ he says, chin in hand, gazing out of his window towards Wormwood Scrubs prison. ‘Sometimes it’s appalling. Frankly, the way BSE was reported was abysmal. The way much of cloning was reported was also quite dreadful, prurient.

‘There’s good and bad. But there’s certainly clear evidence that we need improvement. The difficulty is not so much the science writers as the newsprint journalists and the news conveyers on television. It troubles me deeply that, for example, it’s impossible to have a serious scientific discussion on Newsnight although science regularly comes up on Newsnight. It’s got to the stage now where they ring me and invite me to come onto the programme and I generally don’t because, frankly, I’m not at all convinced that they seem capable of really understanding why scientists feel that they’re not presenting scientific work in a way that is at all reasonable. To present science as entertainment may increase your viewer figures, but it doesn’t actually help the issues that you are discussing.’

Science, ethics and embryonic stem cells

Despite being distracted by his laptop at times, glancing to see if it’s rectified itself, Winston is an engaging interviewee. He is articulate, intimidatingly erudite, and witty – but also occasionally prickly.

Sticky questions of religion and ethics in scientific matters, such as embryonic stem cell (ESC) use, clearly ruffle Winston on this occasion. When I ask him whether he has an opinion as to when human life becomes a human person, he grows frustrated and impatient. While expressing deep respect for many central values in Catholicism, Winston finds this debate particularly Catholic, and particularly perplexing.

‘I am puzzled by the concentration on the definition of the beginning of life. I find it difficult to understand how a fertilised egg, which may be fertilised abnormally and have no possibility of being viable, can be equated with a born child. And I have no understanding of how a fertilised egg, which has only a 15% chance of becoming a viable child on average, can be regarded as being inherently so valuable that you would not be prepared to pursue improvements in human health, save the mother’s health, save the mother’s life, if necessary, in preference to that embryo.’

Those who condemn the use of ESC lines on ethical grounds often cite scientific advances in adult stem cells as an additional reason for halting their use. While adult stem cell research may show their surprising multipotency and therapeutic potential, it’s early days yet and Winston cautions against scrapping ESC research.

‘The truth is that there isn’t enough information to choose and it would be foolish to abandon one branch of research in favour of another before either is much more than fledgling form, given the fact that ESCs are being wasted at the present time.

The push should be to try to use them maximally, to try to see whether or not there are certain advantages in using them.’

When we touch upon human cloning, a contemptuous laugh encapsulates his dismissive attitude towards those who claim to be on the brink of successfully cloning humans. Does he feel we need internationally binding regulations in place to control it?

‘I can’t get worked up about cloning. I think it’s an issue that is irrelevant. I just think we’ve wasted so much time getting outraged and engaged by a technique which is of no real value to anybody and, actually, is not likely to work. I think there are much more important things. Why have international regulations on cloning but not on stem cells or transgenic animals or animals in research, or human medical research? I think cloning should be seen for what it probably is: a dead end that is of no great value, and a couple of pompous and rather bombastic individuals, one American, one Italian, who make periodic announcements about how many children they’ve cloned.’

New Year wish list

When I ask Winston to comment on what issues the UK biosciences need to address in 2003, he dwells silently for several moments.

‘My main concern is the Medical Research Council. I’m rather concerned that the institution of collaborative grants and the abandonment of a policy of having project grants has, in many ways, not always been helpful; I think it’s resulted in the MRC actually narrowing and reducing its constituency, and therefore reducing its influence over medical research in Britain. I think that one of the issues for the new Chief Executive will be to try and review whether or not it might not be better to spread the money slightly wider, given that there was a slightly increased budget.

‘Another issue remains with the MRC: it would also be quite good to see a bit more transparency about the way grants are applied to review. I think that might be possibly true across UK science generally. Whilst peer-review is a very good thing, I think that sometimes the mechanisms aren’t as transparent as they might be.

‘I think there are so many issues really. I think we’re not doing enough to explain to the public and politicians why this investment in science is needed. To most people, for example, the letters BBSRC and MRC are meaningless; people don’t know what they stand for or what these bodies are doing. We should be doing much more about communicating, in a rather simpler way than we generally do, what we expect to achieve from our research. I think science is often seen as a rather esoteric pursuit for the benefit of a few people rather than for the benefit of society as a whole.’

Reluctant celebrity

The scope of Winston’s work as a researcher, clinician, a medical media celebrity and a Labour Peer who recently chaired the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology is enviably exciting. While he admits somewhat ruefully that ‘sitting in a laboratory would be the most satisfying thing to do,’ I ask him whether he enjoys the celebrity status that his work has brought him.

His reply – and not the first time in my interviewing him – seems brusque and catches me off-guard. However, I realise that such replies reveal a fundamentally humble and humane streak to Robert Winston. While he obviously derives immense pleasure from his media work and fulfils the role aptly, it is secondary to why he does it, and his surprisingly serious reply reaffirms that streak:

‘I don’t think I understand the word “celebrity”. I don’t approve of “celebritisation” at all. That’s not what I try to achieve. The reasons for the profile are because I think that there’s a great need to present the value of science – and unless we do that we’re doomed. If there’s a spin off of being slightly better known as a result, that’s a penalty I have to accept.’

This interview contains extracts from Humane Instinct, published in Biobits (November 2002), the newsletter of the Institute of Biology.