Robert Winston People Quotations

Whether you're religious or not, there is a real need for other people's religious positions to be treated with the upmost respect.

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.

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.

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?'

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.

The disturbed individual who believes himself to be Christ, or to receive messages from God, is something of a cliche in our society. Ever since Sigmund Freud, many people have associated religiosity with neurosis and mental illness.

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.

I think scientific arrogance really does give a great degree of distrust. I think people begin to think that scientists like to believe that they can run the universe.

Surgeons always underestimate the pain and disability involved in what they do to people.

I'm a traditional Jew with an orthodox background, and it informs much of my approach to science. Of course I think it's very important that if you have those sorts of backgrounds you don't impose them on other people as a clinician, of course.

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.

I've been all over the world on my own because, as a scientist, you travel a great deal if your work is reasonably successful or published. I get invitations to go to all sorts of strange countries where I would mostly be by myself and just meet other people there, instead of having travelling companions.

Now we have technology where we can modify the genomics of individuals by gene transfer and genetic meddling, we may find that people will want to modify their children, enhance their intelligence, their strength and their beauty and all the other so-called desirable characteristics.

I don't like being a celebrity, really... Some people get greater praise than they deserve because they have had exposure in the media. I don't think I agree with that at all.

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.

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.