Dr Frank Ryding is an anaesthetist from Hereford who started working for the International Red Cross in 1981. His Red Cross experiences were made into several programmes for BBC Radio 4: ‘Letters from the Front Line’ and the programme ‘Friday Lives’ won the ‘Sony Award for Best Feature’. He was awarded an OBE for ‘Services to the Red Cross and the campaign to ban land-mines’. Outside medicine, he writes plays, runs a hospital choir and lectures on architecture. In another life, he spent 2½ years on the ice on two expeditions with the British Antarctic Survey anaesthetising elephant seals.