Words matter. These are the best Robert Winston Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
You can now modify the genes of large animals, and the largest animal we are concerned with is the human.
Having a child is arguably the most important thing you do in life.
Carbon dioxide is unusual because it doesn’t go through the usual three phases of matter, from solid to liquid to gas, but it goes straight from solid to gas. The volume of the gas is much greater than the volume of the solid. When a solid turns into a gas, we say it sublimes. The process is sublimation.
Animal rights activists talk about cruelty and torture, some backing their assertions by publishing out-of-date photographs of ‘experiments’ banned long ago. This is a misrepresentation. The work we do is performed with compassion, care, humanity and humility. I have never seen an animal suffer pain.
However pragmatic you are, it is very demanding being a new parent.
Following 25 children for the TV series ‘Child of Our Time’ has been extraordinary. The BBC’s original plan was to commemorate the new millennium. What better way than to film a number of expectant mums from across the U.K.? Coming from widely different backgrounds, all were due to give birth on January 1, 2000.
Although religion might be useful in developing a solid moral framework – and enforcing it – we can quite easily develop moral intuitions without relying on religion.
I remember eating in school in the years after the Second World War. Most of my friends had miserable portions of Spam with an inedible, glutinous pudding served in containers we called ‘coffins.’ As a vegetarian, I had a lump of loathsome cheese and some bread.
I actually don’t mind whether people can choose the sex of the baby – in fact humans have been trying to do it for 3,000 years. But there is a real issue about the safety of the technique.
It is important that legislation keeps pace with scientific progress.
By discovering how our minds work, we can improve our learning power and unlock our true potential.
Scientists need to be prepared to engage, and the best people to engage with are students, ideally from primary school because there’s no question that their capacity to work out complex things is extremely good.
I used to work for the World Health Organisation in poor countries all over the world – Bangladesh, Korea, the Philippines and India. You learn a whole range of things about how other people are living and try to connect with them to gain an understanding of where they’re coming from.
It’s extraordinary to think that if you walked into a room and said you had never heard of Hamlet, you would be regarded as a Philistine. But you could walk into the same room and say, ‘I don’t know what a proton is,’ and people would just laugh and say, ‘Why should you know?’
A young woman in her teens has about 300,000 eggs in her ovaries. By the time she is menopausal, none are left.
It is time my colleagues got real. All British universities doing worthwhile research use animals, and, instead of hiding, they should be boasting of their achievements.
I did not study science at school until I was 13, when I was totally turned on by a seemingly dreary old teacher who suddenly, unannounced, manufactured a huge explosion in the middle of a totally boring monologue. From then on, all of his class wanted to make explosions.
I think it’s important for scientists to be a bit less arrogant, a bit more humble, recognising we are capable of making mistakes and being fallacious – which is increasingly serious in a society where our work may have unpredictable consequences.
IVF is very commercial. The people doing it are among the best-paid in medicine: they charge a lot per treatment and it’s not in their interest to make it more effective. Having people fail means that they come back again.
Scientists tend to build a reputation on refuting the theories of those who have gone before. Yet, whatever we hypothesize, observe, measure or record about the natural world, it leaves more unanswered questions.
Far too many scientists, including my good friend Richard Dawkins, present science as the truth and present it as factually correct. And actually, of course, that clearly isn’t true.
We are more dependent on science and engineering than at any other time in history. However, there is plenty of evidence that far too many people are scientifically illiterate, often having been put off science at school.
There were never any doctors in my family. But my grandparents and my mother had a strong social conscience that was formative.
Nearly all inventions are not recognised for their positive side either when they’re made. So, for example, scientists didn’t go out to design a CD machine: they designed a laser. But we got all sorts of things from a laser which we never remotely imagined, and we’re still finding things for a laser to do.
When I grew up, we didn’t have a TV, and I think more families today have ambitions of getting out of their environment, such as sending their children to university.
Parents should talk to their children, even when they are babies and can’t talk back.
We give antibiotics to people when they’re dying or when they’re not well; that’s acting God. I mean, acting God is using the tools of creation to try and improve human life, human existence. I don’t think that that’s a huge problem.
Ethics is not routinely taught to science students except in medicine, and I think it should be.
I love the French detective series ‘Spiral.’ It’s quite brutal to watch, but I’m already hooked.
My first vote was for a communist in east London when I was a medical student. But I’ve voted Tory, Labour and Lib Dem in my time.
While nobody has identified any gene for religion, there are certainly some candidate genes that may influence human personality and confer a tendency to religious feelings. Some of the genes likely to be involved are those which control levels of different chemicals called neurotransmitters in the brain.
You can’t be judgmental about babies. They are all have different needs. I was left with an enduring hatred of cheese because it was forced down me when I was young.
As parents, can we counter the effect of television violence? One worrying feature in Britain is that so many TV sets are in a child’s bedroom; this means that the mediating effect of watching with a parent, the ability to discuss and interpret what has been seen, is lost.
People think I appear on television to promote my image. That’s not fair. I hate filming. I turned down ‘Strictly Come Dancing.’ But television is a wonderful opportunity to promote scientific ideas. ‘Super Doctors’ is a very thoughtful piece.
I don’t much like being a public figure, because so often how people appear is not how they really are, and I think one of the issues about our society is that we make judgments about people on the basis of very flimsy evidence.
Some of the hotels I’ve been put up in for work in Scotland have been shockingly bad. They’re the type of hotel where the bedroom is like a cell and the Internet doesn’t work. I feel quite aggrieved at that because you should at least be treated reasonably well and have basic comfort.
That Britain today is a liberal society is largely because of the philosophy and outlook of the Anglican Church, which did so much to shape our core values in the past few centuries.
Much as I like and admire Richard Dawkins, I do think that to call a book ‘The God Delusion’ is very worrying because the title implies that if you don’t believe in what I believe then you are ‘deluded.’ That, I think, is a dangerous concept and one that is unlikely to win hearts and minds.
About 3 million IVF babies have been born since Louise Brown’s birth in 1978. Bizarrely, when this life-giving treatment was first considered, it was massively controversial. A storm of vitriolic protest came from many religious leaders, journalists, politicians, regrettably even other scientists and doctors.
However you define God, and whether you believe in God or not, the world we live in has been shaped by the universal human conviction that there is more to life than life itself; that there is a ‘god’ shaped hole at the centre of our universe.
Robots may cut down on infection and mean a consultant can see more patients, but wouldn’t you rather meet the doctor than a machine?
Women of child-bearing age steadily run out of eggs by the continuous process of cell death. While reading a copy of the ‘Guardian’ carefully from cover to cover, a normal woman will have lost on average two eggs – while, typically, a normal man will have made 70,000 new sperm.
We must not confuse religion with God, or technology with science. Religion stands in relationship to God as technology does in relation to science. Both the conduct of religion and the pursuit of technology are capable of leading mankind into evil; but both can prompt great good.
I think that good parenting should allow children to be children. That naivety and slightly open way of looking at the world is very valuable.
