Winston wins me over

I know, what a tacky title for a blogpost. But to be frank I don't really care what you think, because I am buddies with Lord Professor Robert Winston - the guy with the big moustache on telly who knows all about human behaviour! By buddies of course I mean we are on email terms - althought I have stood face-to-face with the man himself taking his picture. Now that I've got your attention, please do read on.

On May the 12th good old Bob came to Manchester to give us postgrads a talk to promote his new book 'Bad Ideas', which you can scope out here if you haven't already heard of it. This was a lecture I had been anticipating for weeks, as Winston was a childhood hero of mine. I used to religiously tape (VHS of course; it was the 90's after all!) his moustache-muffled science musings in the form of The Human Body, Human Instinct and The Human Mind.

To a neuroscientist like myself, Winston is what Sir David Attenborough is to a zoologist - practically a God of Wisdom. So when people queued up after the fully booked event, I naturally joined this line, after a quick internal debate as to whether I actually had a clever question to ask him. Disappointingly, many before me intended only to get their picture taken with him with a cheesy grin on. My stomach churned when I saw one of my friends commit this unholy deed. If a musician met John Lennon, would he really ask him to "say cheeeeese!"? I doubt it. Anyhew, the self-indulgent facebook-enthusiasts in the line before me meant that the Professor was ushered out of the building before I got my chance to pose my question.

I pushed aside my annoyance and remembered what Bob had said in the beginning of his talk - that he always replies to students' emails. So I trotted home determinedly and decided to write to him. Despite the Professor's promise, I never imagined I'd get a reply within 45 minutes of pressing 'Send'. What was even more remarkable was that this genius with no less than eight titles behind his name (check out his achievements here), considered my query as "A good question".

I guess at this point you're wondering what I asked him? I'll take you through the essence of it. Winston argued in his talk that the great technological advances of our times - microchips and the contraceptive pill included - have been largely made NOT due to goal-oriented conduction of scientific research, but rather haphazardly, with their wider societal utility having been revealed only retrospectively. Indeed, this is true. In fact, many drugs, such as cancer drugs, penicillin and antipsychotics (used for schizophrenia and hallucinations), were not discovered because scientists set out to find treatments for these conditions. Rather, these successful drugs were designed for for different purposes, and were later shown to work more of less perfectly for the conditions that they are used for today. Only after this discovery did researchers figure out the mechanisms of why they worked so well. In this way, these drugs were produced by a method that can be viewed as the opposite of goal-oriented medical research, which takes the mechanism of a disease as a starting point, and then designs drugs to stop the disease.

My question was: should we change our thinking of how to conduct and fund scientific research when for example much of medicinal research is based on curing diseases (i.e. 'goal-directed science')? I asked Professor Winston whether he had ideas on what would be the alternative to 'goal-directed science', if this is more likely to lead to greater advances in terms of societal benefit?

Winston's reply was that "we need to make sure we continue to devote a substantial part of the budget to non-orientated, blue skies research". This was his suggestion for an alternative to the goal-oriented medicinal research I was talking about. He continued: "Actually I am not sure that you are right about medical research - which mostly is not focused on finding cures, but rather exploring phenomena and mechanisms. Certainly this is true of the MRC and even Cancer Research UK, which funds a huge amount of basic human and cell biology." The Professor had left me corrected. The answer didn't leave me satisfied on what the future direction of medical research should be - but I guess that's why we have politicians!

Coming back from a family Bank Holiday, I saw Winson was back on the BBC again! This time the Professor was probing human personality. I learnt that being 'agreeable' won't get you a big salary, but does forbode good health and better relationships. Definitely something to consider when sorting out one's priorities! I wanted to take 'The Big Personality' test myself - but the website has been experiencing "major technical problem" since the airing of the program. You can try your luck yourself by clicking here: BBC's BIG PERSONALITY TEST

And if this really grabbed your attention, you can read more in 'Bad Ideas?' which is currently on sale for less than half price on Amazon: Hooray for credit crunch price busters!