Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today is a brain surgeon,

but even that title, resonant as it is with images of high precision, high-risk surgical intervention,

doesn't fully capture the extreme pressure that comes with Owey's job. He specialises in pediatric neurosurgery.

Most of his patients are babies or young children,

and he's one of the world's leading experts on the separation of conjoined twins,

fused together at the head.

It is the kind of surgery that puts the physical and ethical demands

placed on surgeons into stark relief, never more so than in a case Owezjilani undertook two years ago.

Over the course of many months and three major operations, he and his colleague David

Dunaway separated twin Pakistani sisters, Safa and Marwa, who were joined at the head and whose brains shared vital blood vessels.

It was a case which made headlines around the world, not least because Dr. Gilani has spoken honestly and frankly about the ethical dilemmas he had to navigate.

What motivates a doctor to embrace such extreme life and death pressure on a daily basis?

Well, always, Giulani joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you. I think it is fair to say that

there's a little bit of a mystique

around people like you, around brain surgeons. I'm delighted we've persuaded you out of the hospital

into the studio. Do you think it is useful to talk about the work you do and maybe undo some of

that mystique? Absolutely. I don't quite understand why the mystique is there,

but I think it's really useful to talk about it. When you decided to specialize in this particular form of

surgery, what was it that attracted you to it? Well, when I decided that I was going to be a brain surgeon,

I knew nothing about brain surgery. I was quite young, which was one of those

things that sounded interesting. And I have an uncle who's a trauma surgeon, and I recall him

saying on a number of occasions that you can fix various parts of the body, but when you injure

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