Extremes: Life, Death and the Limits of the Human Body

About this book

'If you want to know what the human body can take, and why we must continue to push ourselves beyond the limit in the name of exploration, then read Extremes: Life, Death and the Limits of the Human Body.' Professor Brian Cox In anaesthetist Dr Kevin Fong's television programmes he has often demonstrated the impact of extremes on the human body by using his own body as a 'guinea pig'. So Dr Fong is well placed to share his experience of the sheer audacity of medical practice at extreme physiological limits, where human life is balanced on a knife edge. Through gripping accounts of extraordinary events and pioneering medicine, Dr Fong explores how our body responds when tested by the extremes of heat and cold, vacuum and altitude, age and disease. He shows how science, technology and medicine have taken what was once lethal in the world and made it survivable. This is not only a book about medicine, but also about exploration in its broadest sense – and about how, by probing the very limits of our biology, we may ultimately return with a better appreciation of how our bodies work, of what life is, and what it means to be human.

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Biography

Kevin Fong is a doctor of medicine with a special interest in human space exploration and the medical challenges of living and working in extreme environments. He is a lecturer in physiology at University College London and has worked with NASA at Johnson Space Center in Houston. He currently works as a consultant anaesthetist at University College London Hospital, is founder and associate director of the Centre for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine and is a Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Fellow. Dr Kevin Fong's broadcast career includes the acclaimed BBC TV documentaries Space Shuttle: The Final Mission, Back from the Dead and How to Avoid Mistakes in Surgery; Channel 4's series Extremes A&E, as well as presenting science programmes for BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service.