Robert Winston
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 December 1996
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Desert Island Discs today the castaway is Robert Winston.
As Professor of Fertility Studies at Hammersmith Hospital in London, he has been at the forefront of medical developments in his field. He pioneered the screening of embryos for genetic defects and has frequently made the headlines with his views that all women, including widows, lesbians and those who are HIV positive, should be considered for treatment.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.2 | The program was originally broadcast in 1996 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a doctor. He practices in a controversial field, fertility. |
| 0:35.4 | He was born into a Jewish family in West London, studied medicine, |
| 0:39.1 | and after a brief spell in the theatre joined the Hammersmith Hospital where he's been on and off ever |
| 0:44.3 | since. In 1981, three years after the first so-called Test 2 baby was born, Hammersmith |
| 0:50.4 | opened the country's first National Health IV clinic and it's from this |
| 0:54.4 | position that my castaway has campaigned passionately for patients of all kinds, HIV positive, |
| 1:00.4 | lesbian, widows and lovers to be allowed to make the babies they want. But he |
| 1:05.8 | scorns the idea that he's playing God. There's an extraordinary need for what |
| 1:10.4 | we're doing, he says. It has huge value for mankind's future he is |
| 1:15.0 | professor Robert Winston Lord Winston indeed but Robert making people fertile where they are not. |
| 1:24.0 | Surely that is a kind of act of God, isn't it? |
| 1:28.0 | Well, the ability to pro-creator is, I suppose, an act of God. |
| 1:32.2 | What we're doing is to use the materials of creation. There is a |
| 1:37.4 | concept that by using the materials of creation mankind is in the situation of Imitatio day he's imitating |
| 1:48.5 | God which is seen to be good by Judeo-Christian thought and indeed the First |
| 1:54.9 | command in the Bible is be fruitful and multiply and it goes on to say and fill the |
| 1:59.6 | earth and then the fourth verb in the Hebrew is and subdue it. |
| 2:05.0 | And that's the notion that mankind uses technology to improve his environment, to use it to improve his lot to improve the quality of life. |
| 2:17.0 | So you can imitate God but you're not supplanting him, that's the point. |
| 2:20.0 | Yes, we're not creating from nothing, we're creating from what already exists. |
... |
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