Interview: Winston Puts SuperDoctors Under the Microscope

Professor Robert Winston returned to our screens with his latest medical documentary series SuperDoctors, on BBC One on Thursday August 21. He explains why he wanted to look at some of the hottest topics in medicine, including stem cell research, and how we can all get more involved in science.

Professor Robert Winston gently holds the hand of mother Yvette McGeehan as she cries over the loss of her son.

She had twins Dominic and Rebecca through IVF treatment, but before he was eight, Dominic contracted meningitis and fell into a permanently awake coma. The family had tried everything they could to bring him back and, as a last resort, they found a doctor in Dominica – one of more than 200 million on the internet offering ‘stem cell cures’. Foetal cells were injected into Dominic’s brain, but despite initial signs of improvement he died not long afterwards.

In SuperDoctors, a new three-part series for BBC One, Winston set out to tackle some of the most controversial new medical frontiers – from expensive robotic surgery to improvised treatments in Africa. The episode on stem cells reveals that the unproven treatment could have contributed to Dominic’s death and the medical expert issues a stark warning to the medical profession against making unfounded claims. We also follow two men with serious heart disease – David, 53 and Alec, 75 – who have turned to stem cell treatment as their last hope.

David takes part in a double-blind placebo trial in the UK – the only way to find out if stem cells really work – while Alec, who is too ill to take part in the trial, makes a life-threatening journey to Germany to have stem cells from his pelvis injected into his heart – a procedure he doesn’t really understand. “That’s a real issue for medical tourism, whether you should dissuade people from doing something which might help them, when you haven’t got any clear evidence it wouldn’t,” says 68-year-old Winston, when we meet in his office at Imperial College London.

“With the Germany situation, it would be very difficult to dissuade Alec. With the McGeehans, I think every single effort should have been made to dissuade them, but I don’t think you would ever have dissuaded Yvette. She was absolutely focused on Dominic and for her, as she says to the camera, ‘We wanted our son back’.

“You can’t deal with that emotion rationally, so therefore you’ve got to do two things – you’ve got to educate people more about the limitations of expectation and equally you’ve also got to educate the profession to be much more stringent about how it presents things that it cannot prove.”

SuperDoctors is, in Winston’s words, “a bit unusual” for a BBC science programme. “We raise a lot of uncomfortable issues. It’s very critical, very thought-provoking, clearly controversial – and one of the most serious programmes the BBC have done this year, so I’m very pleased to be involved in it.” The robotics episode throws up the ever-present question of how the NHS should be spending its money.

“We see surgery which probably doesn’t work, on the base of the brain, which is the most dangerous area of the body,” explains Winston. “The surgeon with this £12 million piece of equipment abandons it and goes on to operate by hand. Of course, he gets the result he needs and there’s no harm done, but you have to ask the question, ‘is it justified to spend all that money on this massive machine, what’s the advantage?’”

In complete contrast, the last episode sees Winston in poverty-stricken Malawi where orthopaedic surgeon Steve Mannion has clinics for children and adults with club feet. With no money and no access to technology, Mannion has resorted to using a little-known physiotherapy treatment called the Ponseti technique – with excellent results. Winston is in no doubt of the lessons Mannion’s ingenuity has for the West.

“We’re spending all this money on robots for example, maybe we should spend a bit more time thinking about how we might help healthcare in places like Africa more effectively, without spending vast sums of money. “I’m not arguing we shouldn’t be doing hi-tech, we should be more responsible about how we place our budget.”

Lord Winston has become a stalwart of the BBC, as recognisable as Sir David Attenborough and Bruce Forsyth – and has made it his lifetime’s work to make science more accessible. Throughout 15 television series, the moustachioed expert has explored every aspect of medicine from child development, in the ongoing Child Of Our Time, to what makes us tick in the Bafta award-winning The Human Body. Born in London, Winston studied medicine at Cambridge on a whim – he applied to do Natural Sciences but decided he was “more interested in dealing with people than microscopes”. But he ended up looking down microscopes anyway when he specialised in fertility – pioneering developments in IVF treatment.

With all his medical knowledge, he remains modest about his achievements, and insists he has more to learn. “I don’t think there’s any point in doing a TV programme if you don’t learn something,” he says, smiling. “That’s the reason for doing telly for me, it’s not because I want to be famous, it’s much more because it helps me think. “When I’m talking to camera, none of those pieces are planned, they are genuine reactions, it’s part of the learning process, more in these programmes than in most that I’ve done.

“I’m genuinely coming at these things with a reasonably open mind. I had suspicions about stem cells and robotics and in a way I end up more confused at the end than I was at the beginning, because I’m still not clear whether cardiac stem cell treatments have a place or not.”

Winston also claims his career in TV is “only a hobby” – and his fame is something neither he nor his wife and three children take very seriously. “I think a lot of the time they’d rather it wasn’t happening, but each of my children have different attitudes. They do their own thing really and have a healthy disrespect for what I do. If you start taking yourself too seriously in my family, you’d soon find yourself out on a limb,” he laughs. That said, he’s quite serious about the medical ground still left to cover on TV. “I regret that we haven’t tackled gene therapy,” he says. “I think the ability to modify genes and therefore change the course of a disease is a really big frontier and a big issue. It raises lots of difficult problems, it’s hugely risky and could provide huge benefit.”

He warns that we might have to wait until 2010 for the next instalment of Child Of Our Time, which follows the lives of 25 millennium babies. “My feeling is we shouldn’t do it next year, we might wait a year until they’re 10. I think we shouldn’t expose these kids too often,” he explains. “I think its great stuff, but there are a lot of things I’d like to do on television that are not about child development.”

Such as?

“Oh God! Any of the issues facing society, energy, warming, nuclear power, I would like to get away from medicine a bit. The history of science, how science shaped the world… if the BBC will let me.”

:: Away from the small screen, Robert was recently nominated ‘Peer of the Year’ for all his work on the contentious Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which has been delayed until autumn.

:: His new appointment as chair of science and society at Imperial has involved him in organising outreach to schools – there are currently 70 summer school groups learning about science at the college.

:: As part of his mission to make science accessible, Robert has published 10 books including children’s titles What Makes Me Me? and It’s Elementary! which encourages young people to enjoy chemistry.

:: A practising Jew, Robert has criticised fellow scientist Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion for its “inappropriate response to religious views”.

:: He believes ethics is not taught enough in conjunction with science at university. “Doctors have to recognise that their role is to preserve, protect and maintain human life.”