LORD Professor Robert Winston must cut a strange figure at Arsenal's Highbury stadium - when he can get there.

The fertility expert with a growing TV career has a Gunners season ticket but is so busy he often has to give it away come Saturday afternoon.

And when Lord Winston of Hammersmith does manage to take his seat in the lower terrace, usually after a morning trip to the synagogue in Hampstead - surely a man needs his god after he's watched his team - he wonders why he bothers.

Speaking to The Herald from his office at Imperial College, London, he explains: "The trouble is I find it quite agonising.With Arsenal, no matter how well they're playing they always have a terrible 10 minutes when you can't believe how bad they are and it becomes masochistic."

So why do you go?

"It's the human instinct, and it's one of the things I mention in my book - Human Instinct - we need company. We couldn't have survived in the desert alone because you need a company of hunter/gatherers.It's the herd instinct. It explains why I go to Arsenal with my season ticket and sit next to these overweight loudmouths shouting and swearing the most horrible sexual invective against their own side and yet when Arsenal score I want to hug them."

But, as he says, Lord Winston is usually too busy to go up the Arsenal. For as well as his day job as professor of fertility studies, he is the director of NHS research and development for Hammersmith Hospital, one of the leading medical research centres. He also has parliamentary business, having become a Lord in 1995, and speaks regularly at the House of Lords. He is chancellor elect of Sheffield Hallam University, and of course, TV presenter and book writer. On top of that he is on various hospital committees.

On the Monday lunchtime when The Herald contacted him he revealed:"I've been working in my lab. I've been looking at a project which involves cognitive behavioural therapy in children.

"I've been looking at pain relief and taking one or two press calls. I've also answered some of my e-mails. I usually get about 100 a day. I don't work set hours. I don't tend to get in before 10 am but I usually work until two or three in the morning at home when I do a lot of my writing."

His diary is full six months in advance and he often has to turn down lecture requests, but he will be giving a talk entitled Can Science Change Human Nature? at Guildford's Yvonne Arnaud Theatre on Thursday, November 21.

"Some of it will be light-hearted but I also want to raise a couple of important points and I think this is a good way of doing it.

"One issue is that we might be tempted to alter our genetic structure over the years. If you define a species by its DNA, its genome, and then change that genome, you'd be creating another species. I'm not saying we should be doing that, I'm just making the point. I would be very concerned about it and would only want to use genetic research to control disease, not alter people's characteristics"

Lord Winston talks rapid-fire, word-perfect accessible science. In conversation and in his television series you can't help but feel if people like him were teaching in schools we wouldn't have the problems we have attracting science students.

"I would say science is the most exciting area to be working in because there are fundamental, riveting questions and it's why I've made the programmes," he says.

In an edition of his latest TV outing, Human Instinct, he revealed what drives sexual attraction. For women: men with inverted triangle shapes; for men, predictably, it's the size of a woman's chest. Does he ever use his knowledge of what makes us tick to his own advantage?

"It's an interesting question. It must affect me but I try not to be manipulative."

Asking him what his greatest achievement was, one might expect him to mention pioneering the test-tube baby, but his answer is more personal:"My three children"

One of those grown-up children has followed in his footsteps and is studying neuroscience at University College, London.

Professionally, he cites the development of genetic testing as his greatest feat.

Over the past few years, a number of television series have dragged the professor out of his lab and in front of the camera.

"It all started when my trousers fell down when I was doing a filmed caesarian section", he said, adding he will explain all at the Yvonne Arnaud!

James Bowman