Sir Robert, Lord Winston, at 86, is not just an elder statesman of the science of human fertility, but may be said to be a major founder of the IVF industry: IVF being in vitro fertilisation: the creation of a human being outside the womb, in vitro, in glass, that is to say, in a test tube. As can happen with pioneers, he is not altogether pleased with what he helped to create: I don’t mean the human beings who have been born as a result of the procedure, but the $23 billion industry which exploits their would-be parents.
This emerged in a recent interview on the Triggernometry podcast, headlined “The IVF pioneer who says his own industry is lying”. The natural desire for children, for all the low birthrates of much of the world, has provided easy prey to those who use the techniques Winston developed to rake in staggering amounts of money. In the interview, Winston, loaded with honours for his work as he is, including a peerage, pointed out IVF’s shockingly low success rate: even after six attempts only 34% of patients end up with a baby. As he put it: “In Vitro fertilisation becomes a torture because you end up with women, if they can afford it, going for 18 cycles of IVF, they become professional patients.”
Equally shocking is the fact that the financial incentives for IVF clinics are such that they have no interest in investigating why a couple has not had children naturally. In many cases, Winston explained, relatively simple and inexpensive (and, one could add, ethical) medical interventions could deal with the issue, or the problem could be solved by weight loss, or simply by perseverance. Once a couple has come through the doors of an IVF clinic, however, they are on a production line that leads though multiple invasive medical techniques, if not to a bouncing baby, then at least to a hefty bill.
It was interesting to hear the father of IVF tell these home truths, which tend to be swept under the carpet by the media. He has already been cancelled to an extent, in fact, for saying on the BBC Newsnight programme that human beings cannot change sex (he’s never been asked back). However, it is not that uncommon for pioneers to be disappointed by what is done with their ideas.
For example, Larry Sanger, one of the two founders of Wikipedia, has so annoyed the Wikipedians with his criticisms that he has been permanently banned from editing it. Again, plenty of political revolutionaries have been distressed by the way their revolutions have panned out, and indeed nearly all of the early leaders of the French and Russian revolutions ended up being murdered by their comrades. However, Lord Winston has something in common with the likes of Robespierre and Trotsky in that, while he has a lot of harsh things to say about how his work has been developed and used, he is unwilling to question its first principles. In his case, this would be the wisdom of separating the generation of offspring from the marital act.
