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Kevin Fong: medicine at the final frontier
Perspectives
Profile Kevin Fong: medicine at the final frontier
Anthony Cullen
“I’ve made a career out of having an unconventional career”, says Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Fellow and Director of University College London’s Centre for Space Medicine, Kevin Fong, whose professional trajectory makes him one of the more well-rounded scientists of today. Fong, who holds degrees in both astrophysics and medicine from UCL, has the sort of CV that would stand him in good stead as Dr “Bones” McCoy’s replacement on Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. A specialist in anaesthesiology and intensive care medicine, Fong’s first book, Extremes: Life, Death and the Limits of the Human Body, was published this year. Still not satisfied, he hopes to continue to expand his work in science communication with his popular television and radio broadcasts. Fong grew up in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the moon landings and Apollo fever. He attributes his passion for science to his parents, who woke him up one summer evening in 1975 to watch the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project—a memory that has stayed with him. “We didn’t have professors coming to dinner, and I didn’t have lecturers coming for tea, and so, I was stuck in front of episodes of Horizon and shown rockets and dinosaurs”, Fong recalls, adding, “You stick a 5-year-old kid in front of people flying into space at 17 000 miles per hour, and the message that sends to you is that anything must be possible”. Pursuing a degree in astrophysics seemed to be the most obvious choice for Fong, who describes the experience as a “privilege”. But at the end of his undergraduate studies he had the opportunity to speak with Nobel Prize winner Maurice Wilkins, the former physicist who, experiencing guilt after his work on the Manhattan Project, went on to play a pivotal role in elucidating the structure of DNA. After hearing Wilkins’s story first hand, Fong decided to go to medical school: “I thought it was time to come back to Earth and do something more practical.” Coming from this background made medical school a “fresh” experience for Fong. “I was always able to learn more about the normal from looking at the extreme in physics”, he says. “I guess that kind of mapped forward into my medical career.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was ultimately drawn to anaesthesiology, an area of medicine where he felt he could reduce an urgent problem to its basic components. “There was an attempt to go to first principles”, he explains. “As naive as that attempt is, it’s that place where I found this slightly comforting attempt to chase down a rationale for why the variables are moving the way they are moving.” At that point, Fong had long abandoned his childhood obsession with space exploration—but in his final year of medical school, he visited NASA for an elective course. “The problem was, once I had done that, it was like someone who had been used to substance abuse suddenly having another 932
hit”, he says. While he continued work in anaesthesiology after graduating, he immediately began researching the physiological impact of space travel with NASA’s Human Adaptation and Countermeasures Division at Johnson Space Center, before returning to UCL and setting up its Centre for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine programme, in 2001, where research encompasses “the extremes of human physiology; both in the physical world— altitude, space, and dive medicine—as well in the intensive care setting”, Fong explains. With the publication of Extremes, which is out in paperback next month, Fong wants to share his enthusiasm for space medicine with the public in the same way that his parents were able to pique his interest in science as a child. “It is the story about how, over the 20th century, the same exploration that took us out across the world and on into space, took us in, to better understand our physiology and our biology”, he says. “All of that conspired together to create the expectations of life and survival that we have today, that we take for granted because we live in the moment without thinking about how hazardous everything has the potential to be.” Extremes examines settings where the human body must adapt to cope with some of the harshest-known environments—from the Antarctic to outer space. “The clever thing to do if you’re trying to communicate something is to hook in with a superlative example, and then move back, and make your audience realise—and this is as true for medicine as it is for physics—that the true beauty, all the nuance, all the complexity, is back in that initially more prosaic bit in the middle”. While Fong will continue to practise medicine, he plans to “carry on adventuring at the same time”, particularly in the field of science communication. He’s just completed his fourth Horizon film for the BBC and returned from Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Canada where he’s been making a radio documentary about the tenth anniversary of the global SARS outbreak. Fong believes that his public engagement projects are important ways to share his optimism for future exploration and scientific advancement with a wide audience: “You realise how all of this advance is part of the same dirty cocktail of exploration and science and technology and our difficult relationship with those things.” But he also points out that “It seems to have progressed us. Life has never been longer-lived and never safer, certainly for the population of the developed world”. In a world that is frequently sceptical and fearful of technological progress, it’s refreshing to talk to a person as optimistic about science— and humanity—as Kevin Fong.
Michael Granovetter, Niall Boyce www.thelancet.com Vol 382 September 14, 2013
Profile Kevin Fong: medicine at the final frontier
Anthony Cullen
“I’ve made a career out of having an unconventional career”, says Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Fellow and Director of University College London’s Centre for Space Medicine, Kevin Fong, whose professional trajectory makes him one of the more well-rounded scientists of today. Fong, who holds degrees in both astrophysics and medicine from UCL, has the sort of CV that would stand him in good stead as Dr “Bones” McCoy’s replacement on Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. A specialist in anaesthesiology and intensive care medicine, Fong’s first book, Extremes: Life, Death and the Limits of the Human Body, was published this year. Still not satisfied, he hopes to continue to expand his work in science communication with his popular television and radio broadcasts. Fong grew up in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the moon landings and Apollo fever. He attributes his passion for science to his parents, who woke him up one summer evening in 1975 to watch the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project—a memory that has stayed with him. “We didn’t have professors coming to dinner, and I didn’t have lecturers coming for tea, and so, I was stuck in front of episodes of Horizon and shown rockets and dinosaurs”, Fong recalls, adding, “You stick a 5-year-old kid in front of people flying into space at 17 000 miles per hour, and the message that sends to you is that anything must be possible”. Pursuing a degree in astrophysics seemed to be the most obvious choice for Fong, who describes the experience as a “privilege”. But at the end of his undergraduate studies he had the opportunity to speak with Nobel Prize winner Maurice Wilkins, the former physicist who, experiencing guilt after his work on the Manhattan Project, went on to play a pivotal role in elucidating the structure of DNA. After hearing Wilkins’s story first hand, Fong decided to go to medical school: “I thought it was time to come back to Earth and do something more practical.” Coming from this background made medical school a “fresh” experience for Fong. “I was always able to learn more about the normal from looking at the extreme in physics”, he says. “I guess that kind of mapped forward into my medical career.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was ultimately drawn to anaesthesiology, an area of medicine where he felt he could reduce an urgent problem to its basic components. “There was an attempt to go to first principles”, he explains. “As naive as that attempt is, it’s that place where I found this slightly comforting attempt to chase down a rationale for why the variables are moving the way they are moving.” At that point, Fong had long abandoned his childhood obsession with space exploration—but in his final year of medical school, he visited NASA for an elective course. “The problem was, once I had done that, it was like someone who had been used to substance abuse suddenly having another 932
hit”, he says. While he continued work in anaesthesiology after graduating, he immediately began researching the physiological impact of space travel with NASA’s Human Adaptation and Countermeasures Division at Johnson Space Center, before returning to UCL and setting up its Centre for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine programme, in 2001, where research encompasses “the extremes of human physiology; both in the physical world— altitude, space, and dive medicine—as well in the intensive care setting”, Fong explains. With the publication of Extremes, which is out in paperback next month, Fong wants to share his enthusiasm for space medicine with the public in the same way that his parents were able to pique his interest in science as a child. “It is the story about how, over the 20th century, the same exploration that took us out across the world and on into space, took us in, to better understand our physiology and our biology”, he says. “All of that conspired together to create the expectations of life and survival that we have today, that we take for granted because we live in the moment without thinking about how hazardous everything has the potential to be.” Extremes examines settings where the human body must adapt to cope with some of the harshest-known environments—from the Antarctic to outer space. “The clever thing to do if you’re trying to communicate something is to hook in with a superlative example, and then move back, and make your audience realise—and this is as true for medicine as it is for physics—that the true beauty, all the nuance, all the complexity, is back in that initially more prosaic bit in the middle”. While Fong will continue to practise medicine, he plans to “carry on adventuring at the same time”, particularly in the field of science communication. He’s just completed his fourth Horizon film for the BBC and returned from Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Canada where he’s been making a radio documentary about the tenth anniversary of the global SARS outbreak. Fong believes that his public engagement projects are important ways to share his optimism for future exploration and scientific advancement with a wide audience: “You realise how all of this advance is part of the same dirty cocktail of exploration and science and technology and our difficult relationship with those things.” But he also points out that “It seems to have progressed us. Life has never been longer-lived and never safer, certainly for the population of the developed world”. In a world that is frequently sceptical and fearful of technological progress, it’s refreshing to talk to a person as optimistic about science— and humanity—as Kevin Fong.
Michael Granovetter, Niall Boyce www.thelancet.com Vol 382 September 14, 2013