Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a scientist, forensic pathology is his trade, patiently reconstructing

the nature and the circumstances of death.

He leads Britain's first task force on standby to investigate war atrocities,

and his grim work has taken him to the killing fields of Rwanda, Cambodia and Kosovo.

He's one of the pioneers of the so-called Lazarus technique, a method of facial reconstruction

which uses a laser to generate computer profiles from a skull.

He was born in Cyprus and moved to England with his family in the early 50s. He didn't speak

any English until he went to school. He failed his 11 plus, but he decided early on he

wanted to be a doctor and worked hard to get to medical school and into the fascinating world that became his career.

I'm not so much interested in the perpetrator but in the victim, he says, that's the way I play it.

He's the Regis Professor of Forensic Medicine and Science at Glasgow University, Peter

Vanezes.

Yours is a job, Peter, which has been very much glamorised by television, by fiction and so on, but in reality the first question one has to ask is why do

you do it how come you chose to do this that's a very difficult one actually so because I didn't really choose it at the very beginning.

I decided to do medicine because I wanted to be a doctor in the conventional sense of the word to treat live patients but I soon realized that pathology was

certainly the field that I became interested in. But it wasn't that you didn't have a

good bedside manner and you don't need one with the dead. No, I did, I had a reasonable bedside manner.

I didn't do any harm to any of my patients in my early days.

And in fact, I wanted to do cardiology.

But it so happened that I wanted some laboratory experience

...