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Hello, I'm Kirstie Young.

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My castaway this week is Dr Kevin Fong.

His specialist subject is how the human body deals with extremes, both here on Earth and in space.

He's worked a lot with NASA and his associate director of the Centre for Altitude Space and Extreme Environment Medicine.

But his day-to-day rounds, as a consultant and nestedist at a big London teaching hospital,

are focused on the equally challenging demands of earthbound disease and injury.

It was the mid-1970s when he first became fascinated by man's interstellar adventures,

watching the Cold War detente of the Apollo Soyuz Space Collaboration on TV.

But it seems likely that his ambition to achieve was also sharpened by his parents.

First-generation immigrants, they were determined that their kids would use a good education as a weapon against ignorance and prejudice.

He says of his work, as I began to understand what we were up against in trying to treat the extremes of illness and disease,

I started to wonder which was the more ridiculous pursuit, standing at the end of a bed, tilting at the windmills of critical illness,

or staring down telescopes at destinations that lay waiting to be explored.

So welcome, Dr Kevin Fong.

I'm talking to you at a time, of course, I'm afraid to say when we have seen these horrific terror attacks both in Manchester and in London,

of course, being a medic in a big city right now, you will be more on alert than most.

Were you involved in the aftermath of the London Bridge attacks?

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