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The Life Scientific

Lord Robert Winston

The Life Scientific

BBC

Society & Culture, Personal Journals, Science

4.61.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 December 2011

⏱️ 27 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

He's the man on the telly with the big moustache, famous for A Child of Our Time, The Human Body and Making Babies but Robert Winston is also a well respected scientist. He played a pioneering role in developing IVF technology, and has brought life to many hundreds of couples who had given up hope of ever having a baby . Jim Al-Khalili talks to Robert Winston about why he quit the theatre to become a medic, creating human life in a test tube and why he disagrees with Richard Dawkins about The God Delusion.

Producer: Anna Buckley.

Transcript

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0:00.0

You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

0:03.8

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

0:08.6

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

0:15.0

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

0:20.0

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

0:23.7

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

0:28.3

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

0:30.2

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

0:36.1

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

0:40.5

Thank you for downloading the Life Scientific from BBC Radio 4.

0:45.0

This program has been edited since broadcast.

0:48.0

My guest today is perhaps best known to most of us as the man on the telly with the big mustache who makes scientific

0:55.3

ideas accessible to us all through TV programs like Child of Our Time, the Human

1:00.5

Body and before that making babies. He'll do what it takes to get the scientific

1:05.8

message across and on one memorable occasion he volunteered to be the subject in one not quite so carefully controlled experiment exploring the effects of

1:15.3

alcohol on the brain.

1:17.0

Well what was I saying? Alcohol just influences behavior. Some people just get belligerent. Others. No, way, ma'amit.

1:32.1

Professor Lord Robert Winston, welcome to the life scientific.

1:36.0

It is perhaps easy to forget that away from the TV screen,

1:40.0

you're a doctor and a research scientist specializing in fertility.

1:44.3

You were heavily involved in IVF research at the Hammersmith Hospital in London,

1:48.8

pioneering new techniques to screen human embryos in the hope that certain genetic defects

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