Dr Kevin Fong

Speaker 40:00

This is the

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B B C

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Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Presenter0:43

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 is Associate Director of the Centre for Altitude Space and Extreme Environment Medicine. But his day-to-day rounds as a consultant and naesthetist at a big London teaching hospital are focussed on the equally challenging demands of earthbound disease and injury.

Presenter1:12

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 T V. 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 the London Bridge attacks?

Dr Kevin Fong2:18

Yes, I was. I was on duty at my hospital, University College, London Hospital, that night. It was quite a night. I've been sort of, I guess, unfortunate enough to be involved in a number of these major incidents over the years. I have quite strong feelings about them. In some ways, it's better to have a role, to not be a bystander in these things, to have something to give to these things. I think it helps. And in some ways, in a bizarre way, it makes it easier. These are emotionally very, very horrible events. But I learnt long time ago, I learnt that an event like that, for you as a frontline medic, can be both

Dr Kevin Fong2:58

You know, emotionally extraordinarily negative, but also professionally quite positive.

Presenter3:03

Yes, I mean the anaesthetist and their fellow surgeon, in these sort of circumstances you must almost feel knitted together with the people that you have gone through these things with.

Dr Kevin Fong3:13

This is not any heroic individual or even a small group of heroic individuals. This is an army of people who are moving to a plan that's put in place. And you look across the bed and you look across the bay, and there are dozens of people, and you know, your nurse colleagues, your paramedic colleagues, your doctors, anesthesis, surgeons, all of you, all of your specialities, AE, all of it together, and you are a single unit. And on those nights, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Presenter3:44

I wouldn't imagine on nights like that, of course, that anybody is choosing the music that is on in theatre, but of course, so often I speak to medics and they say that music is a big part of their daily working life. Are you one of these medics who says, Can we put on my music today?

Dr Kevin Fong3:57

No, the thing I remember most is when I was a house officer, there was one particular surgeon who used to insist on heroically closing to Elvis Presley's Glory, Glory, Hallelujah And it sort of always made me smile a bit, you know?

Presenter4:09

That's my kind of surgeon. And tell me about your first choice today then. What are we going to hear?

Dr Kevin Fong4:14

Oh, this is a great track. This is Queen and it's Radio Gaga, but it's from the live performance during Live Aid, I think 1985. And I remember this so clearly, beautiful summer, and watching this on television. And it just seemed like such a hopeful, hopeful time that this stadium full of people would pay a few quid to help a bunch of people in trouble thousands of miles away who they didn't understand, had never met, but they were willing to do that. And this particular track, particularly at the end, Freddie Mercury as an incredible performer, but also his crowd participation at the end. It just, you know, if I was on a desert island, that's what I'd want to wake up to in the morning.

Speaker 45:20

Yeah.

Speaker 45:22

Yeah.

Speaker 45:23

Yeah.

Presenter5:31

From their performance at Live Aid in nineteen eighty five, that was Queen and Radio Gaga. So Kevin Fong, let's understand a little bit more of your professional life. As I mentioned, you are Associate Director and Co founder of something called Case, and that is the Center for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine. Can you describe for me

Presenter5:49

The baseline impact spending time in space has on the human body.

Dr Kevin Fong5:54

It's tempting to look at space and think that it's this glorious business class spite with the added benefit of floating around a bit, but it's anything but. And because it's filmed in HD in wide angle, you get this luxurious view of it and these beautiful vistas, but to the human body it's an extreme environment like any extreme environment. And it's as tough as walking to the pole, tough as climbing the highest mountains, as tough as walking into deserts. And it extols that toll on your body every moment that you're up there. And so examining that is fascinating. It's hard enough as a doctor looking after astronauts just to keep them healthy. And that's before you start thinking about what happens if something goes wrong.

Presenter6:32

So we see the pictures, of course, of when these astronauts land back on Earth, and and they look completely shattered by that experience. They look drawn, they look certainly not close to death, but maybe on the way to death. They they seem incapable of walking, and their breathing is compromised. Why is that?

Dr Kevin Fong6:51

You go into space, your body adapts, and actually makes some very clever, appropriate adaptations because there's no gravity, and it says, Well, why should I maintain this muscle mass? Why should I maintain all this bone when I don't have to support myself against gravity? Your heart is a pump. It does work against gravity, and it says, Well, why do I need to do all of this work? And so, there's a lot of deconditioning, but that's adaptive. And then you come home, and then you're reloaded with all of that burden, and your body isn't used to it. They come back, and it takes a long time to get them back to what we call earth normal. I mean, it's really earth-normal.

Presenter7:20

Arrest normal.

Dr Kevin Fong7:23

Yeah.

Presenter7:23

How long is a long time?

Dr Kevin Fong7:24

There used to be a rule of thumb, sort of you know a day for every week and some of these these missions are sort of 50 60 weeks the longest of them. You hear these stories because when I was working at Johnson Space Center, you know, you'd hang out with your friends, some of whom were astronauts, and one of them was saying that you know he'd come back and he had a very young child and he'd been away on this six-month tour and the baby had woken up in the middle of the night and he turned around to his wife and said, it's okay, I've been away, it's my turn. He gets up, picks the baby up, puts it on the counter and he realizes that the nappies are on the other side of the room and he thinks that if he lets go the baby the baby's going to float away so he's looking for somewhere to velcro the baby to and then he realizes I'm back on earth.

Presenter8:03

We've all been there at a house at that time in the middle of the night. Um, tell me about your next piece of music, Kevin Fong. What are we going to hear?

Dr Kevin Fong8:09

Your second? When I was studying astrophysics at UCL, I used to try and make an extra bit of money being a DJ at the local medical students' union. And I was the most hopeless DJ in the history of hopeless DJs. And I would scratch records and drop needles. And anyway, it was on a Tuesday evening, so no one would come. So maybe your flatmates would turn up, and there'd be no one in this little room. And there'd be you in your little disco booth. And when there was no one there, we used to just fill the room with fake smoke from the smoke machine and then just come out of the booth and dance around to this song. And then usually you'd forget at the end that you were the DJ. And so you'd have to run back into the booth and try and get another record in in time.

Speaker 49:06

Who will I won't find you?

Speaker 49:10

Oh the hands while the walls can't tolerate them. When they do, I'll be right behind you. So glad we

Presenter9:21

That was Tears for Fears and Everybody Wants to Rule the World and chosen Dr. Kevin Fong because you were enjoying the memories of being a you have to say not a legendary disco DJ in your stupid days, but you enjoyed it. Um your mum and dad are both from uh Mauritius and your dad came to the UK in the fifties. Your mum came over in the sixties, I think. Uh why had they come?

Dr Kevin Fong9:38

They came for the reason I think that most immigrants come, they c they came for a better life, for hope of a better future for them and their children.

Presenter9:45

What did your dad work at when he was first here?

Dr Kevin Fong9:47

You know, my dad's story, the more I talk about it, the more I realise how layered and how complicated and how difficult it was. And he literally arrives off the boat in the late 50s. He doesn't speak much English. He has no money and he has very few people he knows here. And his first job, I remember him telling me, his first job was there was a friend he had in the dispatch department in, it was a department store, and he had to go to this laughable interview where he had to show them that he could wrap a box. And he spent the night before sort of rehearsing how to wrap a box because his friend had told me you can't just go in there and just wrap any old box any old way. And he had to bring the box to the edge of the table and flip it round. And there was a way to show them that you could do it. So that's where he worked. But he didn't do that for very long because he had TB and he collapsed at work one day and found himself in a TB sanatorium in Hairfield. You know, this is an immigrant with no money, with very little English, thinking he might die in this hospital. And I remember him telling me that he didn't understand what was going on, only that he was very, very sick, that he didn't know if he was going to live or die. And the first time he knew that he was going to live was he'd noticed that when you're on your way to recovery, they would help you to ask with a T round. And one day they asked him to help with a T round and that was the first moment he knew he was going to live.

Presenter11:06

When he got out of the sanatorium, when he was well enough to leave, what happened?

Dr Kevin Fong11:10

He shared a room with an Irishman, and he at one point had sort of said how hopeless things looked for him as an immigrant now. And this Irishman said to him, just go and find yourself a Catholic priest. They'll look after you. And he literally walked out of the hospital and walked down the hill and found the first Catholic church he could and he knocked on the door and the priest took him in, took him into town, I think it was bought him some fish and chips and then rang around and found a Catholic family for him to stay with. I never understood it when I was growing up because there was so, so much hardship. He realized it was so hard. He realized that he had to get an education because he didn't, he came from Mauritius with very little education. And my mum describes him as when she first met him as not having enough English to be able to read a copy of the Daily Mirror, you know, that sort of level of English. But he does, through correspondence courses, get himself some, I guess it must have been O-levels, and certificates of higher education. And then when I'm one,

Dr Kevin Fong12:08

He resigns from his job as a filing clerk to take up a place at Trent Park Polytechnic to study business. So he's doing his degree while I'm one.

Presenter12:17

Kevin is not.

Presenter12:19

Well I don't think it is a traditional Mauritian name. You can put me right if you want. It's not. Is it why how come you're called Kevin?

Dr Kevin Fong12:24

You know, my mum's a very devout Catholic and when I was born she talked to the ladies around the church and they said, you know, what shall I call him or to give them a sort of a a more Western name and it was mostly an Irish Catholic community. They said, Kevin's a good name. Yeah, Kevin'll be a good name.

Presenter12:39

So vote to your third choice. What are we going to hear now?

Dr Kevin Fong12:42

So this is Jupiter from Gustav Holst's The Planets. And this is a childhood memory really for me, a very clear childhood memory of my dad lying on his bed surrounded by this classical music and all these books. And to me, that was the way I'd always known him. And I thought it was the way he'd always been, this educated man, surrounded by all this paraphernalia. And of course, that wasn't true. I wasn't interested back then in all that classical music, but the inlay for this particular cassette, The Planets, had a bunch of space stuff on it. And as a child, I thought, oh, it's something to do with space. So I took it and I borrowed it and I played it. And also the hymnal that goes with this piece we had at our wedding. So for me, for lots of reasons, my childhood and the day of my marriage.

Presenter14:30

That was part of Jupiter from the Planets by Hulst, performed there by the English Chamber Orchestra and conducted by Yehudi Menyun. And we were talking just briefly, Dr. Kevin Fong, whilst that was on, a little bit more about your parents and your background and your family. And you were saying that only very recently you came across this little bundle of documents, of letters. Tell me about that.

Dr Kevin Fong14:50

When I was growing up, I remember finding this file in his room, and it was about an inch and a half thick, and it was just letter after letter after letter, rejection letter for jobs he'd applied for. And

Dr Kevin Fong15:02

It was a good hundred or so of them, and it just didn't make sense to me because, as far as I'd been aware, he'd always had the same job.

Dr Kevin Fong15:09

And only recently I found out what had happened was after he'd taken his degree when I had just been born and my brother was on his way, he'd got a job. As far as I can tell, it was sort of tantamount to a constructive dismissal. They just got rid of him. And he'd just bought a house and had a mortgage. But he'd still get himself dressed in the morning as if he was going to work and pretend to my mother that he was going to work. And he did that for six months. And he would go to the library and apply for these jobs in the library all day. And he only got caught out because one day he turned around to my mum and said, you know, do you need any shopping done today? And she said, well, when are you going to have time to go shopping? You're at work. And then he finally came clean. Their fear was that, you know, this struggle would continue into my generation. And so it was absolutely about getting the work done and absolutely protecting yourself from all of the hardship that they had faced. And that meant foregoing a lot of the things that you saw your mates having as you were growing up.

Presenter15:50

Mm-hmm.

Presenter16:05

As you were growing up, what were the rules about schoolwork and the rules about homework and the rules about study?

Dr Kevin Fong16:09

that you were the best and you had to be better than everybody else because everybody else had an advantage over you in that they weren't an ethnic minority. They were white and British. They were white and British. And and

Presenter16:18

They were white and British.

Dr Kevin Fong16:22

Look, you can understand from his point of view why that was given, because he had struggled that that file of rejection letters, you know, the subtext to it was that there's a better candidate than you, and usually it's someone who's born in this country. Well, he said, um

Dr Kevin Fong16:38

When you were growing up, things were so hard that I had to think to myself, What is the minimum level of attainment that I can accept for you that will mean that I've done my job? And he said, And I'd thought about it, and that attainment was assistant manager Woolworth's.

Presenter16:53

And you wouldn't have a job now. That's the thing. If you'd been that assistant manager, we would. Let's go to the next piece of music, Dr. Kevin Fong. We're going to hear your fourth.

Dr Kevin Fong16:56

Jeff.

Dr Kevin Fong17:01

I went to high school, a school called Salvatorian College in Wheelstone and it was again a very Irish Catholic culture there. And you're struggling to be part of this thing, because you are apart from it. And this is the first album I ever bought. And it's a U2 album. And I remember going down to the Hour Price in the High Street, thumbing through the racks and pulling this album out, taking it home. And I so vividly remember the first time I played it, because this is the first track on the album. And I just remember the introduction just humming in there. And it just sort of 15-year-old me was this just remarkable sound coming through.

Speaker 417:45

I want you hand

Speaker 417:49

I wanna tear down the walls that hold me inside.

Speaker 417:56

I wanna reach out

Speaker 418:00

And touch the flame

Speaker 418:04

Where the sea time on them

Presenter18:13

You two where the streets have no name.

Presenter18:15

Tell me about working at NASA then. It's very difficult for those of us who've never even seen the place to understand what it must be like. All of these great brains, very dynamic people working at the very parameters of what human beings are capable of.

Presenter18:31

Explain it to me.

Dr Kevin Fong18:32

If I beamed you into the middle of it now and didn't tell you where you were, I'd defy you to know that you were in the middle of a space center because it's this palette of blue on beige on brown sort of buildings that look like a 1970s university campus. But inside those buildings there is this fire of imagination going on and people who sit around and straightfacedly have conversations about how we're going to fire people 400 million miles across space to the surface of that planet. And it's not pub chat, it's real chat. And these are the people that can do it. And I loved having front row seats to that show.

Presenter19:05

Time for some more music. Tell me what we're going to hear now.

Dr Kevin Fong19:08

So this is on Her Majesty's Secret Service but by the propeller heads and I chose this track because this was the theme tune to my mornings when I was working at Kennedy Space Center and I used to love this. I had a hire car and back in those days I had a much coveted NASA picture badge which would let me into the back gate. So there's a main entrance but back then you could get into the back gate that let you onto the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. And then you'd get around the corner from the guard hut and there was this causeway that crossed the Banana River and all you could see then was to the north of you were the launch pads pad 39A and pad 39B where they'd launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon and then the Vehicle Assembly Building which is this enormous building where they build the rockets at NASA and you just blast along that causeway, you know, windows down, this song blaring. I just felt like I was sneaking into this place and this was the 10 minute drive into work along that causeway that morning.

Presenter20:33

That was the Propeller Heads and David Arnold with their version of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Doctor Kevin Fong, can you just bridge that little bit of your life that went from astrophysics to medicine? How and when and why did you make that choice?

Dr Kevin Fong20:46

I was thinking of doing a PhD in medical physics, but I realized it was the medicine and and not the physics, so I went to medical school.

Presenter20:55

Let's take the temperature, if we may, of the NHS right now. You know, to use a recent political phrase, it has been weaponized by our politicians. And through the EU referendum campaign, more recently in the general election, we hear words like crisis and breaking point and virtual collapse. You've been working in the NHS for years. How would you describe the state of things right now from the inside?

Dr Kevin Fong21:18

I don't think anyone who works on the front line would tell you it's not tough. I think that it's not respectful to those people who day in, day out go out to do you know, they go to the mats for their patients twenty-four days, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. It's not respectful to them to pretend anything other. There needs to be an honest conversation about this, I think.

Presenter21:39

Uh

Dr Kevin Fong21:39

Yeah.

Presenter21:39

Difficulty but near collapse, would you use that phrase?

Dr Kevin Fong21:41

The thing is about it as a system is that because of the dedication of the people involved, it's a sort of self-balancing, self-correcting system, and it copes, but it gets harder all the time. It's not okay to say that we just need to work a bit smarter and it's all going to be okay. It's not true.

Presenter21:58

Let's have some more music, Dr. Kevin Fong. We are on your sixth. Tell me about this.

Dr Kevin Fong22:03

When I first qualified, I think it was 1998, it was sort of the end of that era of outrageously long hours. I think I was one of the last years that worked them, and even then they were beginning to come down. This was sort of a shift pattern where, in the worst cases, some weeks I would go to work on a Saturday morning at 8 o'clock in the morning, work Saturday day, Saturday night, Sunday day, Sunday night, Monday day, and then I'd go home at the end of Monday when the jobs were complete. And I was lucky because my predecessors had started that shift on the Friday morning and gone through a four-day weekend.

Dr Kevin Fong22:35

So I was working, you know, 90, 100 hours a week, maybe more sometimes, and absolutely sleep deprived and at night on call diving around the wards. But we lived in the hospital, we were the hospital. We had a cadre of house officers, all of whom I have very fond memories of living together in that building. And it was, you know, an extreme and desperate time, but actually there was a lot of camaraderie, and I look back now very fondly on it. But bizarrely in my head, whenever I think of those moments being alone and sometimes a little worried and very tired, this tune slightly inappropriately used to play in my head.

Speaker 323:19

Seasons don't fear the reapers, Nor do the wind, the sun, or the rain.

Speaker 323:26

Come on, baby.

Speaker 423:29

Baby, take my hand.

Speaker 423:33

Will be able to fly

Presenter23:50

That was Blue Oyster Cult and Don't Fear the Reaper. Kevin Fong, we were talking earlier today about your involvement in the response to the London terror attacks on London Bridge recently, but much further back you worked in the aftermath of the Soho bombing in 1999 at the Admiral Duncan pub. You also worked on the London 77 attacks.

Presenter24:10

How do you think those experiences have changed you?

Dr Kevin Fong24:13

The nail bombing of Soho in 1999, I think, was a really shaping moment for me. I was less than a year qualified, and I'll never forget it, that every pager in the hospital went off at the same time. So you've got this weird mono pitch from everywhere, out of every direction. And then the phone went and they told us what had happened. And it was a bank holiday weekend at the end of April. And they told us we were stood up to receive this casualties from this terrorist bombing in the pub. And then the phone went again and they said, you know, we need a mobile team to go to the scene. And this in the days really before very well organised pre-hospital care. It's much better organised now.

Dr Kevin Fong24:55

And for some reason I ended up getting shoved into this ambulance and sent to scene and it was just a surreal experience. The first thing that happened in the AE was they unlocked this door that I'd never ever noticed before and inside was this like Aladdin's cave of equipment, you know, personal protection equipment, this sort of fluorescent jackets and the helmets and these packs. These two ambulances screeched into the car park, they shoved me into the back of them. And I'm there with a nurse and we're blasting off down to Soho from UCLH. And the nurse is looking at me and she's shouting at me. She's saying, This is a major incident. You are wearing a personal protection equipment. In your left pocket you will find the following items. And I look in my left pocket and I think how does she know what's in my pocket? And then I realized that she's trained for this and I'm not. And then we got there and the doors opened out onto Compton Street and it was just a horrific scene.

Presenter25:50

In the days after, what was your personal response? How did you manage to somehow make sense of what you'd seen and what had been required of you?

Dr Kevin Fong26:02

I think I found that one most difficult of all the major instances. It was the first time I'd seen it. I'd been there. I'd been on the scene and it had been a particularly violent scene.

Presenter26:12

And this was a nail bomb to remind people it was

Dr Kevin Fong26:13

It was a nail bomb and lots of casualties. I did find it hard in the weeks that followed that. I think that was when I learned that you could separate something, that something could be at the same time horribly, horribly emotionally negative, but you could take some professional pride in how you'd conducted yourselves and what you'd done. Certainly after that, I always felt like.

Dr Kevin Fong26:36

You were there and actually that was something you could set against that. You know, the anger you felt about it, you could set something against that. And so I think after that I've always been interested in the response to major incidents because at least it feels like in some level you can do something about it and set something against it. Um so yeah, I mean they're hard, uh but uh

Dr Kevin Fong27:05

They are hard, but you know, you do learn to cope with them and.

Dr Kevin Fong27:11

It it is what you're trying to do.

Presenter27:13

Let's have some music, Kevin. What's your next one? We're gonna hear your we're we're down at seven now.

Dr Kevin Fong27:17

So, this is Fanfare for the Common Man by Aaron Copeland, and I've chosen this one because this, more than any other piece of music, reminds me of my time making the Royal Institution's Christmas lectures in 2015. And I loved that time. You know, this is a thing that's been going on for 180-odd years. And I had this crazy idea that this brass band would be there, play us out with this, and that I'd be there on the kettle drums. And of course, it's bonkers, and the production team generally moved me away from it. But I just loved that throwing stupid ideas around it, and it was such a great joy to have done those lectures. I would never have possibly imagined that I would have got to do that, and it was so great to do this thing that I, as a child, had watched that brought me on and inspired me to follow science as a career, and then have the chance to give that back that way. And so, this, although we never used it, reminds me of all of that.

Presenter29:14

Fanfare for the Common Man by Aaron Copeland, performed there by the London Symphony Brasp, directed by Eric Crees. Kevin Fong, along with everything else we've spoken about this morning, you also front T V programmes on on science and medicine. One of the documentaries many documentaries that you've made one of them was about this boom in health apps. You know, they monitor the exercise we take, they can even monitor the foods we eat. Do you think they're worth the time and money?

Dr Kevin Fong29:42

It's difficult to know. I think that the idea that we're all going to become our own doctors because all you need is the internet and and a mobile device is probably overvalued. I think that the amount of information we can gather about ourselves will increase and it gives interest. But the first thing that all of this technology will do is make doctors better doctors, and that's kind of what you want it to do. Yes, they're worth the money in the sense that if they incentivize you to live a healthier life, then great. But they're never going to replace the good old-fashioned doctor. I'm not worried about my job just yet.

Presenter30:16

You're going to be all alone on the desert island. How do you predict that you will spend your days knowing yourself as well as you do?

Dr Kevin Fong30:23

I'm not a great one for being without company, I think. Although my experience of most things is nothing is ever as bad as you think it's going to be, and most things there is some unexpected pleasure in it that you never before saw. So I think I'll get to enjoy it in time, and I think I'll do as much exploring of this island as I can possibly do.

Presenter30:41

Do you think you'd be a survivor?

Dr Kevin Fong30:43

I think everyone's a survivor at heart, really. At a very basic level, that's what we're programmed to do. So, yes.

Presenter30:49

Tell me about your final piece of music, what is your eighth disc?

Dr Kevin Fong30:54

When we're out in the car we like to listen to music together. It's sort of almost the only time now that you listen as a family to music together and although I can feel now as my children are growing up our musical tastes diverging, there are a few things that we still listen to together and this is a track from the soundtrack to a film that we very much love, the hilarious Guardians of the Galaxy. But it's a track that we all love and I love it because it's that shared experience for us as a family. I love it because my kids love this track without thinking it's old people's music. And I love it because of the sort of the message of it, that you know there is no obstacle that is insurmountable and nothing's going to stop you from getting where you want to be.

Speaker 431:33

Cause baby, there ain't no mountain high enough Ain't no valley

Speaker 431:41

Ain't no river wild enough to keep me from getting to you, baby. Remember the day I set you free? I told you you could always count on me, darling. From that day on, I made a vow. I'll be there when you want me some way somehow. Oh, baby, that ain't no mind.

Presenter32:06

That was Marvin Gaye and Tammy Terrell and Ain't No Mountain High Enough.

Presenter32:10

Dr Kevin Fong, we have come to the point now where I give you the books. I give every castaway two books, and they take another along. I will give you the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible, and you will take what?

Dr Kevin Fong32:22

Can I swap the Bible for a different religious text? You can. Not because I've read the Bible. So I think I might have the Tripitaka, which is the Buddhist. You may certainly have that. That might come in useful, I think, if you're on your own on a desert island. Yeah, that is yours. And.

Presenter32:24

You can't.

Presenter32:28

Did I

Presenter32:32

You may certainly have that.

Presenter32:34

Yeah, if you're only

Presenter32:36

Yeah, that is you.

Dr Kevin Fong32:38

As my book, I'm gonna get a star atlas, I think, because I think this desert island might have very clear skies and

Presenter32:47

Yes. No light pollution there. You can have that then. A luxury too.

Dr Kevin Fong32:52

And to go with my book, I'm gonna have a really decent pair of binoculars actually, because I think that will be useful. The stars are so much more beautiful through a pair of binoculars, and they're much more so than actually through a telescope.

Presenter33:03

Why I was just going to you yeah.

Dr Kevin Fong33:05

It's just an easier way. You know, you're using both your eyes and you get a wider field of view. And actually, yes, with a telescope you can focus on single objects, but actually part of lying underneath the splendour of that cascade of stars going across the sky on a desert island like this is to be able to see more of it. And actually, in some ways, a pair of binoculars is better for that, or at least I've always found. So, with my star atlas and my binoculars, I think I'll carry on exploring.

Presenter33:35

Wonderful combination. And what would be the one disk that you would save?

Dr Kevin Fong33:39

Oh, I'm definitely going into the the waves after uh Radio Garga. And particularly that uh crowd participation at the end. Definitely. You know, you just wake up to that. You really wouldn't feel alone, would you?

Presenter33:51

Doctor Kevin Fong, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Dr Kevin Fong33:55

Thank you. It's been fantastic to be here.

Presenter34:43

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website, bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.

Speaker 435:16

This is the B B C.