Robert Winston

A bit more about the planet-sized brain behind the avuncular exterior...

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Born in London in 1940, Robert Maurice Lipson Winston’s mother was a councillor for and then Mayor of the former Borough of Southgate (now part of the London Borough of Enfield) while according to various sources, his father died as a result of medical negligence when Winston was nine years old which at least partly inspired his decision to go into medicine.

He attended St Paul's School (London), later graduating from The London Hospital Medical College, University of London, in 1964 with a degree in medicine. He went on to hold junior posts at the London Hospital from that time. In 1970 he joined the Hammersmith Hospital as a Registrar and became involved in research and development in gynaecological microsurgery and various techniques in reproductive surgery, including sterilisation reversal.

Subsequent roles included being appointed to a Wellcome Research Fellowship and then as Associate Professor at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium in 1975. He was a scientific advisor to the World Health Organisation's programme in human reproduction from 1975 to 1977, and that year joined The Royal Postgraduate Medical School, London as consultant and Reader. After conducting research as Professor of Gynaecology at the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1980, he returned to the UK setting up the highly successful IVF service at Hammersmith Hospital which pioneered various improvements in this technology, where, as Professor of Fertility Studies he led the IVF team which pioneered pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, which identifies defects in human embryos, techniques and procedures that have been adopted worldwide.

Lord Winston’s professional CV is lengthy, and littered with acronyms: he is Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College School of Medicine; a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci); an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (HonFREng); a Fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (FRCOG), and of the Royal College of Physicians of London (FRCP); an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (FRCS Edin), Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons (FRCPS Glasg), and the Institute of Biology (FIBiol). He holds honorary doctorates from sixteen universities and is a member of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council where he chairs the Societal Issues Panel. He currently researches transgenic technology, particularly for models of human disease and organ transplants, and is continuing to make efforts towards developing methods for maturing eggs outside the body, thereby making IVF treatment more affordable and less intrusive to patients.

Created a Life Peer in 1995 as Baron Winston of Hammersmith in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, he comments on a wide range of medical, ethical and scientific issues in Parliament, scientific journals and the media. He has chaired the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology.

He is the author of a number of books, several of which won him the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Gold Medal for their simple approach fertility and pregnancy for a lay readership. His non-academic titles include What Makes Me Me; The Human Mind; Human Instinct; Superhuman; The IVF Revolution; Manipulating Reproduction; Making Babies and Getting Pregnant. His latest book takes an usual look at some of the downsides of man’s greatest inventions; Bad Ideas: An Arresting History of Our Inventions.

He is perhaps most well-known however for his various BBC television series, which include the BAFTA award-winning The Human Body, The Secret Life of Twins, Superhuman, Your Life in Their Hands, Child of Our Time, Walking with Cavemen and The Human Mind, all of which have seen him acclaimed for his capacity to communicate complex scientific ideas to a public audience. He has also widened his television appeal with a number of other appearances, including BBC 1’s 2007 series Play It Again, in which he joined five other celebrities re-learning the musical instruments they had abandoned as children.

He is married with three children and is reputed to be a season ticket holder and lifelong fan of Arsenal Football Club.


Bad Ideas: An Arresting History of Our Inventions
We are born with the instinct to create and invent. Indeed our ability to do so is what separates we humans from the rest of the animal world. The moment man first converted a stone to a useful tool set him on a relentless path toward greater control and power over his environment. But have our creative ideas always produced desirable results in line with their original good intention? How many ill-effects and dangers have they brought about along the way? And have they really served us well? Bad Ideas? traces the fascinating history of our attempts at self-improvement but also questions their value. The dubious consequences of the development of weaponry, for example, is self-evident from the primitive but lethal sling to the devastating nuclear bomb. But what of apparently more innocuous inventions such as farming, writing or medicine? All were initiated for the greater good but have nonetheless produced unforeseen fallout that continues to this day. What are their undesirable side-effects, how did they emerge over the years and where will they take us in the future? Written against a huge historical canvas, we join Robert Winston on a thrilling and inspiring journey from our earliest days to the present. We learn about the history of modern science, engineering, IT and much more, following the unexpected twists and turns of their progress. We meet the individuals who played a key role in their development, and share quirky anecdotes about their lives and brainwaves. Inspiring, unusual, and at times controversial, Bad Ideas? enables us by appreciating the past to look forward to the technological opportunities and ethical challenges of the future. In so doing, it celebrates man's extraordinary capacity for achievement whilst warning us that his good intentions can sometimes end up as thoroughly bad ideas.

Read more about Bad Ideas: An Arresting History of Our Inventions at lovereading.co.uk