Kevin’s Story

“I really believe that the communication side of science is incredibly important. I always felt that when people asked me to write something or give a talk, it was kind of an obligation to do it; [but] if you’re anything to do with science, not sharing it with the public is like being the curator of the most amazing, precious artefacts and never telling anyone.”

Kevin Fong claims that there was no life plan. ” I started off studying astrophysics, and then went on to study medicine. At that point, I thought that was that with astrophysics, I would study medicine and be a GP and live in the countryside and wear a cardigan.”

During medical school Fong ran out of money and so started send letters to anyone requesting a grant. This ‘anyone’ included NASA, who wrote back explaining they could not offer money but suggested he applied for their aerospace fellowship. “I didn’t think I had any chance – they only take four people every year.” But he did have a chance and was offered one of the four places.

Fong had been obsessed with space since his childhood; his earliest memory, he believes, was watching a US-Soviet space mission on the television in 1975. The NASA fellowship revitalised this dream, even when he went back to studying medicine.

By 1998, he was trying to think about how to reinvigorate the British space industry, so he set up a meeting between members of NASA and the British National Space Centre; that led to the founding of a space medicine teaching module at University College London (UCL) and then the Centre for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine, also based at UCL.

Fong is becoming one of the most familiar faces of science, having made TV programmes on the frontiers of heart surgery and anaesthetics, and the last space mission by NASA.