Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A fertility doctor who opened the UK's first NHS IVF clinic and campaigned for inclusive access to treatment for all patients.
On the island
Eight records
Brighton Festival Chorus and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Antal Doráti
It's got special associations for me because it's the the chord when Let There Be Light is the moment of discovery, science, and of course it's also about fertility, too. It's about genesis.
I'm choosing music which is related in my mind to human reproduction. And the the next record is the end of the third act of The Marriage of Figaro, where it seems that the relationship between the Countess and the Countess finally resolved, and then he pricks his finger as he picks up Susannah's letter, and you realize from this little fandango or march that it's actually not resolved at all
Mahayeha Metim (Revival of the Dead)
Joseph Malovany, Lieuwe Visser and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Noam Sheriff
It's a kind of requiem. I've always liked requiems, and this is a a requiem which looks at Jews before the Holocaust and then the Holocaust and then the revival of Israel as a sort of nation.
Letzte Hoffnung (from Winterreise)
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, accompanied by Gerald Moore
Last Hope is the description of his watching a leaf falling from a tree, and that's his hope going. And that leaf in the dappled sunlight is just like the embryo that we transfer to the uterus, which generally doesn't actually become a baby.
The Love for Three Oranges (March)
Montreal Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Charles Dutoit
this is birth out of an orange, and it's the march from the love of the three oranges.
Rigoletto (Quartet: Bella figlia dell'amore)
We come, I think, to one of the finest pieces of operatic writing, the quartet in Rigoletto, where we have. The Duke of Manteva s um singing um Bellafilia damori, making love to Madalena, who's laughing at him, and Gilda and Rigoletto are watching this scene, and it's the welding of four total different emotions, sarcastic laughter, lust, portrayed as love, genuine love, portrayed as despair, and vengeance by Rigoletto.
String Quartet No. 8 (Second Movement)
Well, this is a a savage piece of music. It's Shostakovich. And. It has echoes of Lady Macbeth of Motensk, his his opera, because there are lots of quotations from that, and that's an opera about Russian womanhood, and particularly about an infertile woman.
Goldberg Variations (Aria and Reprise)
Well the last record really is very special. It's Johan Sebastian Bach, Goldberg variations. And I mean this is an expression of ultimate fecundity because his music was fecund in the extreme and he was an extraordinarily prolific composer.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:19Robert, making people fertile where they are not, surely that is a kind of act of God, isn't it?
Well, the ability to procreate is, I suppose, an act of God. What we're doing is to use the materials of creation. … we're not creating from nothing, we're creating from what already exists.
Presenter asks
3:08How much of that emotion [from the clinic] rubs off on you?
I find it Actually impossible to talk about my clinic. At home. … I never go home with it, ever.
Presenter asks
5:27When IVF treatment first began only 18 years ago, you were a real Luddite, weren't you? You didn't give it much cop at all.
I've always been pretty stupid about a lot of things actually, and I've always made Errors of judgment of this sort. I mean, I didn't appreciate that in vitro fertilization could actually be. able to work on a broad scale.
The keepsakes
The book
The Koran (in English and Arabic, with an Arabic primer)
There's a reason for that. You know, Islam gets an extraordinarily bad press in our society. I mean, the violence that we use towards Islam verbally is savage, and there's a need to understand this culture much more, and I feel that I could spend some time usefully trying to do that.
The luxury
tools and blank glass to grind a reflector telescope
I've started trying to make reflector telescopes several times in my life and never actually finished because I'm a terrible you know, I flit around from things, I've never finished it off. But I think on a desert island I might have the opportunity of finishing off my grinding and polishing, making a good parabolic mirror, and then being able to watch the stars afterwards.
Presenter asks
18:37Why do you believe that a woman who has a potentially fatal condition [HIV] which she could possibly pass on to a child she bore, why should she have help to have a baby?
You have to understand, first of all, this isn't a general judgment. This was exactly the point. It was an individual judgment in a particular case. … with proper precautions, the chances of the baby dying or being affected by HIV would be less than 10%, probably no more than 8%.
Presenter asks
22:43What's your attitude to helping a lesbian couple have a child?
Well, I think my attitude there is simply this, that Again, I think it's a question of autonomy. And I think my feeling really is that there has to be clear evidence that there is harm to the welfare of any unborn child. And I've not seen that evidence.
Presenter asks
31:29Do you see yourself becoming more politically active in a Blair government?
I shouldn't think so. Who knows?
“much of the time I'm telling people that I can't help them. And very often, because people don't want to hear that, you have to tell them that really quite brutally, almost brutally.”
“I think Judaism has provided answers for very virtually all the ethical problems that I've been faced with, and it's been a tremendously important yardstick.”
“playing God would be taking an arbitrary decision. Not playing God is allowing the argument to develop and then taking what seems to be a just decision after due consideration with as many people as possible.”
“The problem with this kind of genetic engineering is that it will always be unpredictable, and that's a very serious check.”