Old heads with new fix for infant health
Profiles by Andrew Brown
Arthur and Margaret Wynn, dietary experts

Arthur and Margaret Wynn published their most recent scientific paper last week, 30 years after they started writing about maternal nutrition, and a little less than a month after Arthur's 90th birthday; Margaret is 86. "We've been married for 61 years," she said. "Beat that!" The only palpably old-fashioned thing about them is their belief in government as an engine of progress, where people should be concerned about the welfare of even the poorest.

The centrepiece of their research is the belief that a mother's diet has most effect on her baby's health not during pregnancy, but around the time of conception. It is not controversial that low birthweight is bad for babies; but using statistics on poverty and famine in Europe, going back as far as 1848 in Paris, they believe they have established that the crucial factor is bad or inadequate food around the time of conception.

Arthur first came across the problem, he says, in 1927, when his father sent him to Vienna to learn languages. "There was great hostility to Britain then because of the blockade we had imposed in the first world war."

The famine was terrible: "It wasn't just that every animal in the zoo, including the lions and tigers and so on, were all killed and eaten. You have to ask who really did suffer and who died. Well, the old people died, and the other thing was that the babies died. Women's reproduction was seriously affected. They produced little babies and malformed babies. This was put down to starvation."

He spent the second world war working for the ministry of defence, and afterwards became head of safety in the mines research establishment, trying to achieve decent standards in the newly nationalised coal industry.

Margaret continues: "When I was a child in Barns ley the maids in my house were all miners' daughters. Many a time my mother would find them weeping in the kitchen because their father or brothers had said 'there's going to be an accident'. And whenever there was one later, the phone would ring at six in the morning for Arthur. It took me back to the maid weeping because her father had said there was going to be an accident; and there was, and her brother was killed."

Eventualy Arthur became a board member of the national coal board and a very senior civil servant indeed.

Margaret, meanwhile, was raising four children, and working for the Catholic Housing Association trying to find housing for fatherless families. "They often didn't remarry. They had handicapped children which had helped drive the husband away. So I asked myself could you prevent accidents which happened in the reproduc tive process. I went to different countries and looked into the systems they had for the care of children. All the time learning that the origins of these problems were earlier than birth."

It is, they now believe, the four weeks surrounding conception that are really crucial for a baby's future health; and what matters then is not just the quantity of food, but its quality, which is the hardest thing for poor women to manage. But despite 30 years of official indifference, they are fiercely optimistic. "If Yvette Cooper [public health minister] wants to go down in history and to make her mark, she could have a task force for the parts of the inner cities that are producing the most low-birthweight babies. If they could join up everyone who's needed for the area and reduce the low-birthweight rate, it would only take nine months or a year. It's so quick, and so unanswerable."