Professor Lord Robert Winston - member of the House of Lords, scientist, media darling, father. GILBERT WONG talks to a man of many complex parts.
Robert Winston, the man who has been accused of playing God, hardly resembles the supreme being.
"The truth is I do everything badly. I end up with
a very superficial existence. I am terribly conscious of being thinly spread and not doing things as well as I could."
Imagine a member of the House of Lords and the result would be unlikely to resemble Lord Winston, who favours a baggy, forest-green velvet suit and suede shoes the startling colour of butter.
He looks at those shoes as he talks, curling his Groucho Marx moustache as he gives each question a considered reply.
Professor Lord Robert Winston surfed out of the Knowledge Wave conference for a public lecture and other meetings in Auckland on Monday. He may have had the busiest diary of any of the guests.
His life is frenetic and unlikely to slow as he enters his 60s. He admits himself that he has far too many responsibilities, but he cannot let go.
At Hammersmith Hospital in London, he oversees a £47 million ($160 million) research budget. For the BBC he hosted the hit science programmes Superhuman and The Human Body. He is professor of fertility studies at the Imperial College School of Medicine.
He sits in the House of Lords and chairs Parliament's committee on science and education. And he still manages to hold two clinics a week where he sees infertile couples.
He spreads himself thin because he has a skill few scientists can match for speaking with common sense about the controversies science provokes. That, he says, is why he does television. It gives him a profile he would otherwise lack and he uses that influence in important debates.
"Scientists are reluctant to get involved with the media because they see it as ... time wasted, which it is. And they fear that much of the time it can cause jealousy from your colleagues, which it does."
That profile was employed in last year's British parliamentary debate which, partly due to his arguments, approved human stem cell research.
Stem cells, harvested from days-old embryos, could theoretically be used to replace a person's kidneys or liver or cure scores of illnesses from Parkinson's disease to diabetes. But their promise is matched only by the heat of the ethical debate, with opponents calling it at best embryo harvesting, at worst cannibalism.
As an orthodox Jew, Lord Winston's moral compass is set by Judaeo-Christian tradition. The sanctity of life and the need to preserve it are paramount. When it comes to the human embryo, he says the ethical arguments are simpler.
"The human embryo has only a potential to become a human being; 90 per cent of the time it won't become one. Already society has taken on contraception which kills embryos. It has taken up in vitro fertilisation, which discards embryos, and society recognises that embryos are destroyed at menstrual periods naturally.
"Therefore, we don't regard the fertilised egg as having the same ethical status as a fully formed foetus. Once you have a foetus, you have someone who is almost certainly going to be born.
"They are developing a nervous system, they have human consciousness, organs of feeling and a developing personality.
"One of the ethical principles we use in organ transplant is the notion of brain death. Brain death is death. You can remove the organs for transplant. Well, you can consider the embryo as existing before brain life. It has no organs, it has no consciousness in any sense of the word."
Any research, he adds, has to have a moral justification.
"To my mind, if you can harvest cells from a human embryo ... if you could use those embryos to save adult or human life, that is more than an argument - it is an ethical necessity."
In his other area of research, human reproduction, Lord Winston is dismissive of the tag "designer babies". He says it fails to take into account the effect of nurture and environment and, while traits such as blue eyes may be achievable, others such as intelligence or athletic ability involve hundreds of genetic influences that would be impossible to trace.
When a 62-year-old Frenchwoman known as Jeanine gave birth to a baby whose biological father was her brother in May, Lord Winston was as astounded as the rest of us.
"There isn't anything absolutely wrong with a woman of 60 being allowed to give birth. But there are such high and significant disadvantages and risks that it strikes me as an extraordinarily unwise clinical procedure and it's not one I would want to be involved with myself."
But nor will he say when a woman is too old to bear children.
"We are living in a society that is ageing and in the next few decades a significant percentage of the population will be in their hundreds. We cannot afford to lose fit people from the workforce simply because they happen to be 65."
He calls it a curious irony in reproductive medicine that women age more rapidly than men. By 40 one-third are infertile, by 42 two-thirds are.
"These are the very women the state will not pay to have reproductive technology. They are regarded as rejects, too old to have babies.
"Yet the irony is that these are the women who have contributed most to society. They have delayed childbirth to develop skills and careers, they have paid their taxes and here we are as a society, in New Zealand and England - where we are paying lip service to the idea of equality between men and women - penalising woman because of their peculiar physiology."
It would not necessarily be a bad thing to delay reproduction until about 50, he says. Menopause usually arrives at about 52 for Pakeha New Zealand women.
"I don't have an absolute limit. It seems to me that these issues are about society finding a consensus. We can't attitudinise. Society changes and technology changes with it."
Lord Winston is so fluent in these exchanges that one sometimes forgets how self-deprecating he can be. At heart, say those who know him, his work in reproductive medicine springs from his own joy at having a family. He lives in London with wife Lira and has three adult children.
What would Professor Lord Robert Winston have been if he was not a father?
"I have pondered that question a lot. I don't know the answer. What I do think is that any scientific contribution I will make is genuinely trivial when I've produced three children who will have much more effect on society than I've done.
"It all comes down to how we value the next generation."
www.nzherald.co.nz/ge
Report of the Royal Commission on Genetic Modification
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Professor Lord Robert Winston - member of the House of Lords, scientist, media darling, father. GILBERT WONG talks to a man of many complex parts.
Robert Winston, the man who has been accused of playing God, hardly resembles the supreme being.
"The truth is I do everything badly. I end up with
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