Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My castaway this week is Professor Hugh Montgomery.

His area of academic specialism is intensive care medicine.

He's also known for his pioneering genetic research into something called the

ACE fitness gene which determines our capacity for either strength or endurance in themselves

significant achievements, but not it would seem significant enough for today's guest.

He is also in no particular order, a children's author, an ultra-marathron runner, and current

holder of the world record for playing piano underwater.

Being part of the dive team that investigated the treasures of the Mary Rose should also get a mention.

I am not making this up.

He says, I've learned that life can end randomly and

pointlessly at any time. I don't want to be on my deathbed and think damn I

wish I'd learned to paint and write songs. So then Hugh Montgomery you you are a professor of intensive care medicine at the University College Hospital London.

You are surrounded then, I imagine, by life hanging by a thread, sometimes a very tenuous thread, it must be an intense

experience. Given the things you choose to do along with your professional work,

intensity is something that interests you. Extreme, the extremes of life.

Yes, I've not thought of that but you're you're right that's true I I guess in everything in life I like my food

spicy and hot I don't bland. I do like extremes.

Yes, both in exercise and intellectual challenge and emotional life as well.

So it makes you feel more alive, does it?

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