Robert Winston

The Right Honourable
The Lord Winston
FMedSci FRSA FRCP FRCOG FRSB FREng
Personal details
Born Robert Maurice Lipson Winston
(1940-07-15) 15 July 1940
London, England
Political party Labour
Spouse(s) Lira, Lady Winston (1973–present)
Children 3
Alma mater London Hospital Medical College
Occupation Surgeon, scientist, television presenter, politician, and peer
Signature
Website robertwinston.org.uk

Robert Maurice Lipson Winston, Baron Winston FMedSci FRSA FRCP FRCOG FREng[2] (born 15 July 1940) is a British professor, medical doctor, scientist, television presenter and Labour Party politician.

Early life and education

Robert Winston was born in London to Laurence Winston and Ruth Winston-Fox, and raised as an Orthodox Jew. His mother was Mayor of the former Borough of Southgate. Winston's polymath father died as a result of medical negligence when Winston was nine years old, which in spite of popular reports, was not the inspiration for his eventual career choice. Robert has two younger siblings: a sister, the artist Willow Winston, and a brother, Anthony.[3]

Winston attended firstly Salcombe Preparatory School until the age of 7, followed by Colet Court and St Paul's School, later graduating from The London Hospital Medical College in 1964 with a degree in medicine and surgery and achieved prominence as an expert in human fertility. For a brief time he gave up clinical medicine and worked as a theatre director,[4] winning the National Directors' Award at the Edinburgh Festival in 1969.[5] On returning to academic medicine, he developed tubal microsurgery and various techniques in reproductive surgery, including sterilisation reversal. He performed the world's first Fallopian tubal transplant in 1979 but this technology was then superseded by in vitro fertilisation.

Personal life

In 1973, Winston married Lira Helen Feigenbaum (now The Lady Winston). They have three children, Joel, Tanya and Ben who is a film and TV producer and director. He is a fan of Arsenal Football Club.[6] He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Garrick Club, the MCC, and the Athenaeum Club in London.[5] He owns a classic 1930s Bentley.[3]

Winston was a council member of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and Cancer Research UK, and until 2013 was a member of the Engineering & Physical Science Research Council where he also chaired the Societal Issues Panel.[5] He gives many public lectures a year on scientific subjects and has helped to promote science literacy and education by founding the Reach Out Laboratory in Imperial College, which brings schoolchildren of all ages into the university on a daily basis to do practical science and to debate the issues which science and technology raise.[3]

Medical career

Winston joined Hammersmith Hospital as a registrar in 1970 as a Wellcome Research Fellow. He became an Associate Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) in 1975. He was a scientific advisor to the World Health Organisation's programme in human reproduction from 1975 to 1977. He joined The Royal Postgraduate Medical School, London as consultant and Reader in 1977. After conducting research as Professor of Gynaecology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in 1980, he returned to the UK setting up the IVF service at Hammersmith Hospital which pioneered various improvements in this technology, and became Dean of the Institute of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in London until its merger with Imperial College in 1997. He was Director of NHS Research and Development at the Hammersmith Hospitals Trust until 1994. As Professor of Fertility Studies at Hammersmith, Winston led the IVF team that pioneered preimplantation genetic diagnosis, which identifies defects in human embryos and published early work on gene expression in human embryos.

He was the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science from 2004 to 2005. Together with Carol Readhead of the California Institute of Technology, Winston has been researching male germ cell stem cells and methods for their genetic modification at the Institute of Reproductive and Developmental Biology, Imperial College London. He has published over 300 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals.[7] He was appointed to a new chair at Imperial College, Professor of Science and Society, and is also Emeritus professor of Fertility Studies there. He was Chairman of the Institute of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Trust and chairs the Women-for-Women Appeal. This charitable trust which has raised over £80 million for research into reproductive diseases was renamed the Genesis Research Trust in 1997.

Winston is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci), an Honorary Fellow[2] of the Royal Academy of Engineering[2] (HonFREng), a Fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (FRCOG) and of the Royal College of Physicians of London (FRCP), and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (FRCS Edin), Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons (FRCPS Glasg), and the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB). He holds honorary doctorates from twenty three universities.[8] He is a trustee of the Royal Institution in London, and of the UK Stem Cell Foundation. and patron of The Liggins Institute, University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Winston holds strong views about the commercialisation of fertility treatment. He believes that ineffective treatments result in massive anguish to couples and is alarmed that so many treatments for the symptom of infertility are carried out before proper investigation and diagnosis has been made. He is also sceptical about the effectiveness of current methods for screening human embryos to assess their viability.[3]

Media career

Appearing on After Dark in 1994

Winston was the presenter of many BBC television series, including Your Life in Their Hands, Making Babies, Superhuman, The Secret Life of Twins, Child of Our Time, Human Instinct, The Human Mind, Frontiers of Medicine and the BAFTA award-winner The Human Body. As a traditional Jew with an orthodox background,[9] he also presented The Story of God, exploring the development of religious beliefs and the status of faith in a scientific age. He presented the BBC documentary "Walking with Cavemen", a major BBC series that presented some controversial views about early man but was endorsed by leading anthropologists and scientists. One theory was that Homo sapiens have a uniquely developed imagination that helped them to survive. Winston's documentary Threads of Life won the international science film prize in Paris in 2005. His BBC series Child Against All Odds explored ethical questions raised by IVF treatment. In 2008, he presented Super Doctors, about decisions made every day in frontier medicine. In the summer of 2016, Professor Winston stated that the increase in cycle lanes in London had led to a sevenfold increase in pollution in certain parts of London. Professor Winston has been asked to provide empirical evidence for this claim - a request he has so far ignored.

Winston at the Cheltenham Science Festival in 2011

In 2007, Winston appeared in the TV series Play It Again, in which he attempted to learn to play the saxophone, despite not having played a musical instrument since the age of 11, when he learned the recorder.[10]

Among many BBC Radio 4 programmes, he has appeared on The Archers radio soap as a fertility consultant. He has regularly appeared on The Wright Stuff as a panellist as well as numerous chat show programmes such as Have I got News For You, This Morning, The One Show, and various political programmes such as Question Time and Any Questions. Winston is featured in the Symphony of Science episode Ode to the Brain. He also took part in 2011 TV series Jamie's Dream School. In recent years, Winston has been featured on The Late Late Show with James Corden in the United States of America, presenting various entertaining scientific experiments.

Political career

Winston was created a life peer on 18 December 1995 as Baron Winston, of Hammersmith in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham.[11][12][13] He sits on the Labour Party benches in the House of Lords and takes the Labour whip. He speaks frequently in the House of Lords on education, science, medicine and the arts. He was Chairman of the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology and is a board member and Vice-Chairman of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. Winston is a member of the Labour Friends of Israel.[14]

Current posts

Honors and awards

Television documentaries

  • Your Life in Their Hands, BBC 1979–1987
  • Making Babies, BBC 1995
  • The Human Body, BBC, which went by the name, Intimate Universe: The Human Body in the United States, BBC 1998. The series won three BAFTA Awards.
  • The Secret Life of Twins, BBC 1999
  • Child of Our Time, following the lives of a group of children, all born in 2000, as they grow to the age of 20; BBC 2000–present
  • Superhuman, BBC 2001 (won the Wellcome Trust Award for Medicine and Biology)
  • Walking with Cavemen, BBC 2003
  • Human Instinct, BBC 2002 Emmy nomination
  • The Human Mind, BBC 2003
  • Threads of Life, about DNA, BBC 2003 (won the international Science Prize in Paris)
  • How to sleep better
  • The Story of God, BBC 2005
  • How to Improve Your Memory, BBC 2006
  • A Child Against All Odds, BBC 2006
  • Super Doctors, BBC 2008
  • How Science Changed Our World, BBC 2010
  • Inside Britain's Fertility Business, BBC 2016 [20]

Published work

  • "Reversibility of Female Sterilization" (1978)
  • Co-author "Tubal Infertility" (1981)
  • "Infertility – a sympathetic approach" (1985)
  • "Getting Pregnant" (1989)
  • "Making Babies" (1996)
  • "The IVF Revolution" (1999)
  • "Superhuman" (2000)
  • "Human Instinct" (2003)
  • "The Human Mind" (2004). Nominated for Royal Society Aventis Prize
  • "What Makes Me Me" (2005) Royal Society Aventis Prize
  • "Human" (2005) BMA Award for best popular medicine book
  • "The Story of God" (2005) ISBN 0-593-05493-8
  • "Body" (2005)
  • "A Child Against All Odds" (2006)
  • "Play It Again" (2007)
  • "It's Elementary" (2007)
  • "Evolution Revolution" (2009)
  • "What Goes On Inside My head" (2010)
  • "Science Year By Year" (2011)
  • "That's Life" (2012)
  • "Bad Ideas?" An Arresting History of Our Inventions: How Our Finest Inventions Nearly Finished Us Off (2010)
  • "Utterly Amazing Science" (2014) Nominated for Royal Society Prize
  • "Utterly Amazing Body" (2015)
  • "The Essential Fertility Guide" (2015)
  • When science meets God, Robert Winston, BBC News, Friday, 2 December 2005.
  • Why do we believe in God?, Robert Winston, The Guardian, Thursday, 13 October 2005

References

  1. ↑ "Robert Winston". The Life Scientific. 20 December 2011. BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 18 January 2014.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 "List of Fellows". Royal Academy of Engineerin.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Robert Winston: 'I do have a very dark side', The Daily Telegraph, 15 August 2008
  4. ↑ Lemon TI, I am a man—nothing human is alien to me Student BMJ 2013;21:f7203
  5. 1 2 3 University Chancellor Professor the Lord Winston Sheffield Hallam University
  6. ↑ Robert Winston: You ask the questions, The Independent, 17 October 2002
  7. ↑ Scientific Publications in Peer-review Journals, The Official Site of Professor Robert Winston, accessed on 26 October 2008
  8. ↑ Biography, Official Site of Professor Robert Winston.
  9. ↑ Epiphanies: Lord Robert Winston The Spirit of Things, ABC National Radio, Australia, 4 June 2006
  10. ↑ Play It Again: Robert Winston takes up the saxophone, BBC
  11. ↑ "No. 54217". The London Gazette (Supplement). 18 November 1995. p. 1.
  12. ↑ "No. 54252". The London Gazette. 28 December 1995. p. 17450.
  13. ↑ Lord Winston. Parliament.uk
  14. ↑ "Who We Are". Labour Friends of Israel. Archived from the original on 27 July 2008.
  15. ↑ Five minute interview with Professor Lord Winston - University of Surrey - Guildford Archived 14 March 2009 at the Wayback Machine.. surrey.ac.uk. Retrieved on 2016-05-14.
  16. ↑ Charity for Premature birth, miscarriage, IVF. Genesisresearchtrust.com. Retrieved on 2016-05-14.
  17. ↑ "UK-Israel Science Council | British Council". www.britishcouncil.org.il. Retrieved 2017-07-24.
  18. ↑ Professor Lord Winston marks London tree planting scheme. City of Westminster (17 June 2011)
  19. ↑ Professor Lord Winston captures carbon in Marylebone on YouTube
  20. ↑ http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b084ngkd
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