Desert Island Discs

Kirsty Young's castaway is the engineer and international expert on aircraft noise reduction, Professor Dame Ann Dowling. The first female president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, one of her passions is encouraging more young people, particularly women to choose engineering as a career. In 1998 she became the first female professor of Engineering at Cambridge University and went on to be the first female head of the Department. As a child she was fascinated with how things worked, taking her bike apart aged six, and even dismantling the electric lights in her dolls house. Later, an over enthusiastic session with her chemistry set caused the conservatory curtains to briefly catch fire. A passion for aeroplanes led her down the path of aeroacoustics and aircraft noise reduction alongside her hobby of flying airplanes. She was awarded the DBE for services to science in 2007 and was appointed to the Order of Merit in 2016. Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the entrepreneur, Levi Roots.His business success began following an appearance on BBC Two's Dragon's Den in 2007. With guitar in hand, he sang about his 'Reggae reggae sauce' which he had been selling for years at London's Notting Hill Carnival. Both Peter Jones and Richard Farleigh invested in the business and within six weeks, his sauce was bottled and on supermarket shelves. Recipe books, TV shows and a restaurant, or 'rastaurant' followed.He is the youngest of five children born in Jamaica. When he was four, his parents went to build a new life in the UK. Each year one of his siblings came to join the family in Britain. When Levi was 10, he left his much loved grandmother behind, never to see her again. Unable to read or write when he started school, he caught up quickly. He became a Rastafarian as a teenager. Following school, he became an apprentice engineer but left that to pursue a career in music. In his late twenties, he went to prison for five years. His time inside would prove to be a turning point for him. Music continued to play an important part in his life and he was nominated for a Best Reggae Act MOBO award in 1998. A father of eight, he lives in Brixton, London. Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the designer and sculptor Nicole Farhi.Born into a Turkish family in France, Nicole's interest in fashion was present from an early age. As a child, she used to design clothes for her paper dolls; as a teenager, she was taken to couture shows in Paris by her stylish aunts.Aged eighteen, she enrolled in fashion school in Paris and began selling her design sketches to earn a little pocket money, thus setting out on a career as a freelance designer. In the early 1970s, she met the British entrepreneur Stephen Marks who was just starting the retail chain French Connection where she became chief designer, and it was he who encouraged her to set up her eponymous label in 1982. Her fashion empire would eventually extend to New York, London and Tokyo before being sold in 2010, and Nicole herself left the business in 2012.Since retiring from fashion, Nicole Farhi has dedicated herself to her other passion - sculpture. She sculpts predominantly in clay and then casts her works in different materials including glass, bronze and concrete.She has been married to the playwright Sir David Hare since 1992.Producer: Christine Pawlowsky.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Matthew Barzun.Born in New York City as the second of four children to Roger Barzun, a lawyer, and his wife Serita Winthrop, he was brought up in the small Massachusetts town of Lincoln. He followed in the family tradition and read History and Literature of America at Harvard University, taking a break for a year to work as a teaching assistant in Cape Town. After graduating he worked for an internet start-up company in San Francisco, where he became chief strategy officer. He left in 2004 after getting involved with fundraising for John Kerry's failed presidential campaign.He was in the audience for Barak Obama's, 'there are no red or blue States, just a United States' speech in 2004 and subsequently went to work for him, fundraising for Obama's 2008 bid for the White House. When President Obama won, he appointed Matthew as Ambassador to Sweden only to recall him to take up the role of National Finance Chair for the 2012 re-election campaign. Matthew is credited with developing a 'low dollar' model of funding, where many pay a few dollars for tickets to political events. In July 2013, he was nominated as the new Ambassador to the UK by President Obama, a post he took up in August 2013 and which ends in January 2017.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Sara Khan.A British Muslim human rights activist, she's the director of Inspire, a counter-extremism and women's rights organisation which she co-founded in 2009.Born in Bradford in 1980 to Pakistani parents, she decided to wear the veil when she was thirteen changing her mind eighteen years later. She studied Pharmacy at the University of Manchester but never felt she was fulfilling her potential, and set up Inspire in her home. She has been at the heart of various campaigns to raise awareness of her cause from Jihad Against Violence to #MakingAStand which encouraged women in particular to stand up against extremism.In 2009 she was listed in the Equality and Human Rights Commission Muslim Women's Power List and in 2015 was included in BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour Power List. She is currently sitting on the Department for Education's Due Diligence and Counter-Extremism Expert Reference Group and on the Government's Community Engagement Forum.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the actor and theatre director Barrie Rutter.He is the founder and artistic director of the touring theatre company Northern Broadsides. There was nothing in his background to suggest he'd spend his life on stage. He was brought up by his father, who worked nights unloading fish in Hull. There were no books in his childhood home and he discovered his passion for theatre whilst at secondary school with the help of his English teacher who spotted his talent for performing. His first role was as the Mayor in Gogol's, 'The Government Inspector'. He was a member of the National Youth Theatre where he appeared with Helen Mirren and went on to study at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. After a career in the National Theatre and the RSC, in 1992 he founded Northern Broadsides which stages Shakespeare plays, other classical works and new writing with the aim of presenting "Northern voices, doing classical work in non-velvet spaces".Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the actor Warwick Davis.His career began thanks to his grandmother who heard a radio advert calling for short people to be in the latest of George Lucas's Star Wars films. He played his first role as an Ewok in Star Wars when he was 11 years old and found himself on set with his childhood heroes. Since then he's worked on all the Harry Potter films, appeared in TV sitcoms, documentaries, horror movies, quiz shows and Christmas pantomimes. Born with Spondyloepiphyseal Dysplasia Congenita (SED), a rare disorder of bone growth which results in dwarfism, the view of his doctors was that he'd be wheelchair bound and unlikely to live beyond his teens. Now in his mid-forties, he is married with two children of his own.Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the surgeon, David Nott.He works across three London hospitals performing general, vascular, trauma & reconstructive surgery. In addition, for the past two decades, he's spent several weeks every year working in conflict zones around the world for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).Born in Carmarthen, Wales, he was brought up by his grandparents until he was four while his parents finished their training - his Welsh mother became a nurse, his Indo-Burmese father an orthopaedic surgeon. He studied medicine at St Andrews University and completed his medical and surgical training in Manchester and Liverpool before becoming a consultant general and vascular surgeon working in London.He first volunteered to go into a war zone in 1993 when he travelled to Sarajevo. Since then he has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Chad, Haiti, Yemen, Nepa, Gaza and Syria. In 2016 he and his wife, Elly, set up the David Nott Foundation, a charity which funds the training of local doctors to work in conflict zones and hostile environments. Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the political scientist and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University Professor Louise Richardson.She was born in Ireland, is one of seven children and has gone on to have an international career as an academic with a particular expertise in terrorism. She has been consulted by many politicians for her knowledge and insight. After many years as a Harvard Professor, she came to Britain to be the first female Vice-Chancellor of St. Andrews University. Since January 2016, she has been the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University and is the first woman to hold the post. Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the producer Berry Gordy.He founded the Motown record label and his musical empire made worldwide stars of Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross & The Supremes, The Jackson 5 and Marvin Gaye. The second youngest of eight children, he was brought up in Detroit. He left school at sixteen to become a Featherweight boxer, and served as a soldier in the Korean war before making music his career. His first foray into the music business was a jazz record store in Detroit but he was out of step with popular taste and he became bankrupt.It was whilst working on a a car production line that he came up with the idea of setting up a record label. The combination of his song-writing skills and entrepreneurial spirit took Motown music to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and to the centre of American culture during a pivotal moment in America's civil rights history. He was friends with Dr Martin Luther King and recorded some of his speeches on the Motown label. Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the business woman, Inga Beale.She has been the CEO of Lloyd's of London since January 2014 and was the first woman to hold the post in the 325 years since the insurer was founded in 1688.She is the middle child of a Norwegian mother and an English father and grew up in Newbury, Berkshire. Her career in insurance began in London in the early 1980s, but she tired of the predominantly male culture of the industry and left the City in 1989 to go travelling for a year. On her return she worked for the Prudential and then for GE Solutions, the insurance arm of General Electrics, where the work took her abroad.She left GE in 2006 to turn around a failing Swiss company, before joining the Zurich Insurance Group. Her last role before joining Lloyd's as CEO in 2014 was as chief executive of Canopius, a privately held Lloyd's insurer.In 2015, she topped a power list of the world's leading 100 LGBT executives. She is openly bisexual after coming out in 2008 and has been married to her husband since 2013.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Tom Hanks.From 'Big' to 'Sleepless in Seattle', 'Captain Phillips' to 'Apollo 13', his long and distinguished film-making career has brought him multiple awards and many plaudits. He's the recipient of eight Emmys, one Bafta and four Golden Globes and was the youngest ever actor to be given a lifetime achievement award by the American Film institute. The voice of Woody in the 'Toy Story' films, he won the first of his two Oscars in 1993 for Philadelphia and again the following year for Forrest Gump.His parents split up when he was five and he went to live with his father. By the age of ten he'd lived in ten different houses in five different cities. He loved school and developed a passion for history which is reflected in the film he made with Steven Spielberg, 'Saving Private Ryan' and the TV mini-series 'Band of Brothers' and 'The Pacific' which he also produced.His latest film is 'Hologram for The King'.He is married to the actor & producer, Rita Wilson.Producer: Cathy DrysdaleThe podcast version of this programme is an extended version of the broadcast interview.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the businessman, John Timpson.He is chairman of his eponymous high street retailers and the business is in his blood: started by his great-grandfather in 1865 it is now run by one of his sons. Although he fulfilled his family's expectations by running the family firm, he's a man who ploughs his own furrow as all his staff are given the day off on their birthday, and can use the company's holiday homes for free. A proponent of what he calls 'upside down management', his employees, all of whom are called 'colleagues', enjoy an unusual degree of autonomy in the running of the individual shops and 10% of the company's employees have spent time in prison. Married to his late wife Alex for over 47 years, together they fostered 90 children. He has written several books on leadership and pens a weekly business advice column.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the writer, feminist & activist, Gloria Steinem.At the forefront of the second wave of feminism, she came to prominence after publishing an article entitled "After Black Power, Women's Liberation" in 1969. Two years later she co-founded the feminist magazine Ms. As an activist, she has spent much of her life travelling, giving talks and lecturing. Born in 1934 in Ohio, her father was a businessman who ran a lake-side resort in the summer and packed up his family at the first sign of frost to travel cross-country in a caravan selling antiques. Her mother had been a newspaper journalist and later suffered a nervous breakdown before Gloria was born. She became her mother's sole carer aged eleven when her parents divorced. It was only following their separation, having settled down in a house in Toledo, that she spent her first full year at school.After high school, she read politics and government and then traveled around India for two years on a fellowship. On her return, she established herself as a writer in 1960s New York and co-founded Ms. magazine in 1971. Since then, her writing has appeared in innumerable magazines, newspapers, anthologies, television commentaries, political campaigns, and film documentaries in America and internationally. In 2013 she was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest honour, by Barack Obama. Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the artist Yinka Shonibare MBE.His work has populated museums around the globe, with a vivid, subversive and often tragi-comic presence; exploring themes of cultural identity, post colonialism and the impact of globalisation. A Turner Prize nominee in 2004, he has exhibited at the Venice Biennial and internationally.His 'Nelson's Ship in a Bottle' became his first public art commission when it was one of the art works chosen for the Fourth Plinth in London's Trafalgar Square.Born in London, his parents moved the family back to Nigeria when he was three. Later he returned to Britain to finish his education but his plans to study art were brutally interrupted when he was 19 contracted the disease, Transverse Myelitis, which attacked his central nervous system and rendered him paralysed from the neck down. He had three years of intensive rehabilitation before beginning again at art school.He went on to study at Goldsmiths and was part of the Young British Artist generation.Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the engineer and nuclear scientist Dr Dame Sue Ion.The first woman to be awarded the highly prestigious President's Medal by the Royal Academy of Engineering, she has worked her way to the heart of an industry that remains very contentious.Her passion for understanding how and why the world works the way it does first began as she tinkered for hours at her parents' kitchen table with a little chemistry set.Today she goes into schools to encourage more girls to take up engineering and her enthusiasm for the subject has galvanised many to take up the discipline.Producer: Paula McGinley.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Hugh Bonneville.Known around the world for his portrayal of Lord Grantham in ITV's hugely popular Downton Abbey, he made British audiences laugh with his portrayal of the hapless Ian Fletcher in the BBC comedies Twenty Twelve and W1A and charmed audiences of all ages as Mr Brown in the animated film, Paddington Bear.His immense range as an actor has ensured he's seldom been out of work since joining the National Theatre in 1987, but his thespian leanings started much earlier - writing, performing & even creating tickets for his very own dramatic productions - performed for his family at home. He was born in London to a surgeon and a former nurse and grew up with two older siblings. At junior school he refused to let a teacher put him off his passion for acting which he continued to pursue while doing a degree in Theology at Cambridge.He chose an acting career over law, and following a brief time at drama school, his first professional role was "bashing a cymbal" in A Midsummer Night's Dream at London's Regent's Park theatre in 1986. He joined the National the following year and achieved his ambition of being a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1991. His television debut was as a conman in the ITV drama Chancer and his first appearance on the big screen was in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, directed by Kenneth Branagh. He appeared opposite George Clooney in the 2014 film The Monuments Men and was the voice of Father Christmas in the BBC's adaptation of the Julia Donaldson picture book Stick Man.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the architect, Dame Zaha Hadid.The first woman to be awarded architecture's highest honour, the Pritzker Prize, she designed the Aquatic Centre for London 2012, Glasgow's Riverside Museum and has twice won the Stirling Prize - first for the MAXXI museum in Rome and secondly for her design for the Grace Academy school in Brixton, London. She recently became the first woman in her own right to receive the RIBA Gold Medal.She was born in Baghdad in 1950 where her father was a prominent member of the opposition National Democratic Party. After attending school there, she travelled to Switzerland and England to boarding school before returning to London in 1972 to study at the Architectural Association.In 1983 she won her first competition to design the Peak Leisure Club in Hong Kong. It gained her international recognition though it was never built: her first building was the Vitra Fire Station in Germany in 1993. In the late 1990s she built a contemporary arts centre in Cincinnati & a BMW car manufacturing plant in Leipzig. She won competitions to design a new opera house in Cardiff but it was never realised and her first permanent building in Britain was a Maggie's Cancer Care Centre in Scotland built in 2006. She has designed stations for the Nordpark Cable Railway in Innsbruck, Austria and in 2010 the Opera House in Guangzhou, China. In 2014 she became the first woman to win the Design Museum's Design of the Year Award for the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre, in Baku, Azerbaijan.She was made a Dame in 2012 for services to architecture.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the polar adventurer Ben Saunders. In his own words he "specialises in dragging heavy things around cold places".He's one of only three people to have skied solo to The North Pole and he holds the record for the longest solo Arctic journey ever on foot.After traversing Russia and the frozen crust of the Arctic Ocean, his most recent adventure was to triumph where, a century before, Captain Scott and his men failed. Ben successfully retraced that ill-fated Terra Nova route by making the eighteen hundred mile journey through Antarctica-and-back, entirely on foot.When he's not wrapped up somewhere cold, he is a motivational speaker.Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Professor Dame Carol Black.She is Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, and is a special adviser to the Department of Health and Public Health England. She is also Chair of the Board of the Nuffield Trust, the health policy think tank.She read History at Bristol University before beginning her medical career with encouragement from Dame Cecily Saunders, the founder of the hospice movement. She was Head of Rheumatology at London's Royal Free Hospital from 1989-1994, and was Medical Director of the hospital between 1995 and 2002. She's an international expert on scleroderma, a skin and tissue auto-immune disease, and is the second woman to become President of the Royal College of Physicians.She was made a Dame in 2005 for her services to Medicine.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Bill Gates.He sat at his first computer while still at school in Seattle, wrote his first computer programme aged just 13 and went on to co-found the company Microsoft, becoming one of the key figures of the technological revolution. In 2000, he and his wife, Melinda, launched the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has given to date over $34 billion to projects aimed at reducing health inequality around the world.Born into a professional family - his father was a lawyer, his mother a former teacher who later became involved with volunteer work - he was introduced to the idea of 'giving back' at an early age. An avid reader as a child, he attended Harvard where in his sophomore year he and Paul Allen developed software for the first micro-computers. The company would go on to achieve huge success with its Windows operating system. By 1987, Gates had become the world's youngest self-made billionaire, then worth $1.25 billion. Consistently listed as the Richest Man in the World, he stepped down as CEO of the company in 2000 although he remained as Chairman until 2014. These days his primary focus is his philanthropy. In 2010, Gates and his friend Warren Buffett announced the Giving Pledge which aims to inspire the wealthy people of the world to give away the majority of their net worth to worthy causes.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the philanthropist and publisher Sigrid Rausing.Founder of one of the UK's largest philanthropic foundations, her trust has given away around £230m to human rights causes since it began.Brought up in Sweden, she is currently the publisher of Granta Books and the editor of Granta Magazine and her work spotting and developing new writers stems from her lifelong love of literature.As the granddaughter of Ruben Rausing, who founded food packaging company Tetra Pak, she is a member of one of Britain's richest families. Her interest in human rights was sparked as a child by a love of animals and hearing her parents talk about the Holocaust.Producer: Paula McGinley.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the educationalist and writer, Sir Anthony Seldon.Now Vice-Chancellor of Buckingham University, he was the Master of Wellington College. He has written, co-written and edited more than 30 books, including political biographies of Prime Ministers Churchill, Blair, Brown and Cameron.He had to take his 'A' levels twice before going on to read PPE at Oxford and doing a PhD at the LSE, before embarking on his teaching career. His first headmaster job was at Brighton College and then he went onto be Master of Wellington College. During his tenure, the school became co-educational, set up partner schools in China, and introduced a more holistic approach to learning with happiness classes and stillness sessions added to the curriculum and in 2009 the state secondary Wellington Academy was founded in Wiltshire.He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Royal Society of Arts and in 2014 was knighted for services to education and modern political history.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the Sky TV news correspondent Alex Crawford.She's won the Royal Television Society's Journalist of the Year award an unprecedented four times - reporting from the world's worst war zones and hot spots. Where most people would do anything to stay well away from trouble she seems drawn to danger , whether it's covering the Ebola crisis in Liberia, hunting for Rhino poachers in South Africa or being first on the scene as the drama of Libya's revolution unfolded.She spent the first five years of her life in Nigeria, where her family survived two political coups. After childhood in Zambia and subsequently what was then Rhodesia, she came back to Britain as a teenager to go to boarding school and then got her first job as a trainee reporter on the Wokingham Times.She's been shot at, arrested and interrogated. But it's a job she loves and is still passionate to do. For her, there should be no 'no-go' areas for journalists and journalism remains an essential pillar of freedom and democracy.Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the writer Colm Toibin.Best-known for his novels "Brooklyn" - now made into a film - "Nora Webster" and "The Master," he has been nominated for the Booker Prize three times.Born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, the second youngest of five children, Colm's life changed suddenly when his father died after a long illness when he was twelve. He says he has been dealing with the trauma which resulted in his writing ever since. After attending St Peter's College in Wexford and University College Dublin, he spent three years in Barcelona teaching English before returning to Ireland. He worked as a journalist until his books began to get published. He once told a class he was teaching that "you have to be a terrible monster to write. I said, 'Someone might have told you something they shouldn't have told you, and you have to be prepared to use it because it will make a great story. You have to use it even though the person is identifiable. If you can't do it then writing isn't for you. You've no right to be here. If there is any way I can help you get into law school then I will. Your morality will be more useful in a courtroom.'"Producer: Christine Pawlowsky.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Chris Hadfield.He was the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station and took part in three space missions spending a total of 166 days orbiting the Earth. He has spent over 14 hours doing two space walks. He flew his first eight day mission into space in 1995 during which he visited the Russian space station Mir. In 2001 he paid his first visit to the International Space Station to help install Canadarm2, a robot arm helping to build the station which was launched three years previously. In 2012 he began his final five month stay in space on board the ISS. It was on this mission that his videos of life in space - including a film of him singing David Bowie's Space Oddity and accompanying himself on guitar - led to him enjoying a huge following on social media. Chris was born in 1959 in Ontario, the second of five children: his father was a pilot and the family lived on a farm. He mapped out his future career aged nine when he watched Neil Armstrong become the first person to walk on the moon in 1969. In pursuit of his dream Chris first become an Air Cadet, then attended military college, becoming a fighter pilot and then a test pilot, as well as an aeronautical engineer. He finally achieved his ambition of becoming an astronaut in 1992. He went onto become the Chief of Robotics at the NASA Astronaut Office and Chief of International Space Station Operations at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas. Following his final space mission, Chris retired from the Canadian Space Agency in July 2013. Amongst the awards he's received are the military Meritorious Service Cross, NASA's Exceptional Service Medal and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Kylie Minogue. With seven number ones and ten million singles sold in the UK, she is the third-biggest selling female artist in Britain and has sold around 70 million records worldwide. Born in Melbourne in 1968, Kylie and her sister Dannii began their careers as child actors on Australian television. At 17, Kylie landed the role of Charlene Mitchell in the soap opera Neighbours and her on-screen wedding to Jason Donovan's character Scott Robinson was watched by twenty million people in the UK alone. Her recording career began after she was spotted singing at a charity event in 1987. Within months she had released a cover version of "Locomotion" which became the biggest-selling Australian single of the decade. Following the single's success, her first hit with record producers Stock, Aitken and Waterman was "I Should Be So Lucky": her debut album sold seven million copies.At the age of 21, a romance with INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence led to a change in her image. In 2000, inspired by 1970s disco and assisted by gold hot pants, her single "Spinning Around" became her first British number one for a decade. She also sang to an estimated global audience of 3.7 billion at the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics.In May 2005 she was diagnosed with breast cancer: following treatment she resumed the tour 18 months later. Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the surgeon, author and former Reith lecturer, Atul Gawande.A general and endocrine surgeon in Boston, he is professor in both the Department of Health Policy & Management at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School.Born in Brooklyn, he is the son of two doctors who came to the US to study medicine. After graduating from Stanford and studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, he embarked on a brief political career, working for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign and on his health and social policy in the White House following his election. When Clinton's health policy reform floundered, Atul returned to Harvard to finish the medical degree he'd started after Oxford.During his surgical residency he began writing for the online magazine Slate and he's been writing for the New Yorker since 1998. His 2009 article "The Cost Conundrum" was cited by President Barack Obama during his attempt to get the healthcare reform legislation through Congress. Atul has published four books to date about the achievements, but also the limitations, of medicine.In 2014 he presented the BBC's Reith Lectures, delivering a series of four talks titled The Future of Medicine.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Sandi Toksvig.Host of BBC Radio 4's News Quiz until June 2015, she is also a writer and comedian and recently entered the world of politics, helping to found the Women's Equality Party.Her parents were both broadcasters: her mother worked as a studio manager and announcer before she married, her Danish father's job as a foreign correspondent took the family around the world. Sandi and her siblings spent much of their childhood in the United States and when she was "asked to leave" yet another American school, her parents sent her to boarding school in England. She soon decided to lose her strong American accent and went on to Cambridge, where she performed in the Footlights.In addition to writing, her most recent acting role was in Call the Midwife and she continues to appear regularly on TV and radio shows as a panelist: she is to start as the next host of QI, taking over from Stephen Fry. She's also Chancellor of Portsmouth University.

Kirsty Young's castaway is filmmaker Gurinder Chadha.Writer, director and producer behind the films Bend it like Beckham, Bhaji on the Beach and Bride and Prejudice, she began her career as a BBC news reporter.She was born in Kenya to Sikh parents and grew up in Southall in West London. Her political awakening came in her teens in the 1970s against the backdrop of the National Front and race riots in the capital. The bands she listened to, including the Clash, the Jam and the Specials, were fixtures at the Rock Against Racism concerts which galvanised her desire to make a difference.Bend it Like Beckham, which launched the career of Keira Knightly, is now a hit musical on the West End stage. Her next film, Viceroy's House, tackles the Partition of India in 1947.She was awarded an OBE in the 2006 Queen's Birthday Honours List for her services to the British Film Industry.Producer: Paula McGinley.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the Right Honourable Nicola Sturgeon, MSP.Leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the fifth First Minister of Scotland in the devolved era, she is the first woman to hold either post. The eldest of two daughters, she was brought up in Irvine and attended the local Dreghorn Primary School. A studious child, she was encouraged in her interest in current affairs by a teacher and joined the SNP aged 16. At 21, she was the youngest candidate in the 1992 General Election, contesting the safe Labour seat of Glasgow Shettleston.She learned a lot about electoral defeat in those first years, but after several unsuccessful attempts, she was elected to the Scottish Parliament as a list MSP for Glasgow in 1999. She served as the party's shadow minister for education, and later for health and for justice and was elected deputy leader of her party in 2004, standing on a joint ticket with Alex Salmond. When the SNP won the highest number of seats in the 2007 election, she was appointed deputy First Minister. She also took on responsibility for the SNP's independence referendum campaign.In November 2014, following the No vote in the Scottish independence referendum and the subsequent resignation of Alex Salmond, Sturgeon was elected leader of the SNP and became First Minister of Scotland. She's been awarded the Scottish Politician of the Year award three times and in 2015 was judged to be the Most Influential Woman in the UK by BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour. She is married to Peter Murrell, Chief Executive of the SNP.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the broadcaster and religious leader, Lord Indarjit Singh. Creator of The Sikh Messenger newspaper and co-founder of the Inter Faith Network he also has the distinction of being the first member of the House of Lords to wear a turban. He was appointed as a crossbench life peer in 2011. He has contributed to Radio 4's Thought for the Day from a Sikh perspective for more than thirty years and arrived in Britain in 1933. He began his career as a mining engineer and in later life has been involved in inter-faith community work. In the New Year Honours 2009 he was awarded the CBE for services to inter-faith and community relations.Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the mental health campaigner and Chief Executive of SANE, Marjorie Wallace.After leaving University College London with a psychology and philosophy degree, her first job in the media was working on The Frost Programme with David Frost. She went on to produce religious programmes and became a current affairs reporter and director for the BBC. She joined the Sunday Times Insight team as an investigative journalist and wrote a series of articles highlighting the financial and emotional plight of young Thalidomide victims. Her articles on mental illness - The Forgotten Illness - elicited a huge public response and in 1986 she founded the mental health charity SANE. She has received numerous awards for her journalism and books and has twice won the Campaigning Journalist of the Year award.In December 2008 she was awarded the CBE for services to mental health.Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Keith Richards, member of the Rolling Stones, is interviewed by Kirsty Young for Desert Island Discs.Keith was born in Dartford and grew up as an only child. He and Mick Jagger went to the same primary school, but then lost touch until meeting again at Dartford train station in 1961 and discovering they shared a taste in blues music. Keith picked up his love of the guitar from his grandfather and honed his skills whilst at art college.If one single, living person could be said to personify rock n' roll then it is surely him. He's been making music and causing havoc for over half a century and counting. His song writing, singing and guitar playing have helped to make The Rolling Stones a stratospherically successful group and his early and single minded dedication to the triumvirate pursuits of sex and drugs and rock and roll made him a counter-culture icon. No surprise then that as a boy he would go to sleep at night with his arm around his first guitar. Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Professor Sue Black.She is Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology at the University of Dundee, founder and past President of the British Association for Human Identification and heads the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification in Dundee.Brought up on the west coast of Scotland and in Inverness, she fell in love with biology at secondary school and read Human Anatomy at the University of Aberdeen. After graduation she worked at London's St Thomas' Hospital as an anatomist and police began to call on her to help identify bones.In 1999 she travelled to Kosovo, tasked with investigating the site of a mass shooting. She has worked in areas of conflict including Iraq and was part of the team helping to identify victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.She was awarded an OBE in 2001 for her services to forensic anthropology.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Lemn Sissay.As a poet, writer and playwright, much of his work tells the story of his search for his birth parents. Born to a young Ethiopian woman who wanted him temporarily fostered while she completed her studies, he was with a family until he was 12. He would spend the next five years in a number of children's homes where he began to write. On leaving care at 17, he self-published his first book of poetry while on the dole. Several poetry collections, plays and programmes for radio and TV followed and his work has taken him around the world. He was the first poet to be commissioned to write for the 2012 London Olympics and his success has also brought him two doctorates and an MBE for services to literature. He is about to be installed as Chancellor of the University of Manchester, an elected post he will hold for the next seven years. He takes writers' workshops for care-leavers and set up Culture World, the first black writers' workshop.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the musician, Alison Balsom.Widely considered the finest classical trumpet player of her generation, she's performed in all the great concert halls of the world, winning a huge amount of fans and a string of awards for her ability to exquisitely convey the many voices of her chosen instrument.As a child she had dreams of being a part-time trumpet player, astronaut and jockey - she's only 36 so there's time yet for the other two; but whilst she is solely devoting her energies to her instrument her belief in the power of music seems endless. In between gigs, rehearsals, recordings and motherhood, she's found time to travel to Uganda and Liberia as patron of Brass for Africa, with the heartfelt conviction that she can transform the lives of street children by teaching them to play.Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaways this week are the comedy writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran. They've been at the rock-face, mining for laughs, for over 40 years and they've given us plenty of gems ... amongst them monologues in the '70s for Frankie Howerd, the era-defining character Alan B'Stard MP, star of The New Statesman, and now the successful revival of their long running and much loved sitcom "Birds of a Feather".Grammar school boys from North London they first met as ten year olds at a youth club, growing up to have 'real jobs' in the civil service and journalism, before finally embarking on the precarious business of making a living from putting words into other people' mouths.Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Dame Judi Dench.Born into a family with dramatic leanings, she followed one of her older brothers, Jeffery, to drama school. Having abandoned ideas of becoming a set designer, she made her professional debut as Ophelia at the Old Vic in 1957. An illustrious stage career followed in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet in 1960, in Cabaret in 1968 and as Lady Macbeth for Trevor Nunn in 1976. On TV she found huge success in sitcoms - appearing with her husband, the late Michael Williams, in A Fine Romance and with Geoffrey Palmer in As Time Goes By. She received an Oscar nomination for her first big-screen part as Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown; Shakespeare in Love won her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress; Mrs Henderson Presents, Notes on a Scandal, Iris, and Philomena followed. She played the part of 'M' in the James Bond films seven times and is about to appear as Paulina in Sir Kenneth Branagh's production of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.Married to Michael Williams for 30 years, their daughter, Finty, is also an actress.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Dr Bill Frankland.Frequently referred to as the "grandfather of allergy", his achievements include the introduction of the pollen count to the British public and the prediction of increased levels of allergy to penicillin. Born in Cumbria in 1912, Dr Frankland turned 103 in March. He studied medicine at Oxford and worked at St Mary's hospital in Paddington, London, before war intervened. He signed up to the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), but spent over three of the six years he spent in the army as a prisoner of war in Singapore.After the war, he began work in the dermatology department at St Mary's, but quickly switched to allergy which became his passion. During the fifties he served as a registrar to Alexander Fleming who had discovered penicillin back in 1928. In 1954 he published a seminal research paper about a double-blind randomised trial proving that pre-season pollen injections greatly reduced the symptoms of hay fever sufferers. He has treated high profile patients including Saddam Hussein and given evidence in court - possibly the oldest expert witness to do so. He continues to work in a private practice and has remarked, "I really don't know what people do when they retire at 65.".

Kirsty Young's castaway is the chef and restaurateur, Ruth Rogers.Born in America, she has become one of the UK's most celebrated cooks. Despite not being a trained chef, she set up The River Café with her business partner, the late Rose Gray, in 1987. The focus was on high quality, seasonal produce cooked the Italian way. Many of today's top chefs including Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Theo Randall, Sam Clark and Allegra McEvedy began their careers in their kitchen. The café was awarded a Michelin star in 1997. The youngest of three children, Ruth Rogers' parents were both immigrants and very political. In the late sixties, she left America and moved to London where she joined other Americans protesting against the Vietnam War. In 1969 she met the architect, Richard, now Lord, Rogers and they married in 1973. The couple moved to Paris when Richard Rogers and his partners won the contract to design the Pompidou Centre. There she learned the importance of seasonality: subsequent visits to Italy shifted her passion to Italian cooking. Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Monica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University.Well-known in scientific circles, at NASA and the European Space Agency, she came to the attention of the general public with her enthusiastic celebration when, as part of the Rosetta project, the probe Philae became the first-ever spacecraft to land on a comet - 67P - in November 2014. The spacecraft had taken ten years to journey through space and a decade was spent on the preparations.She was born in 1958 in Leeds as the eldest of eight children. She studied chemistry and geology at Durham University and did her PhD on carbon in meteorites at Cambridge, where she worked closely with Professor Colin Pillinger on the Beagle 2 project to Mars. She first worked at the OU in 1983 before joining the Department of Mineralogy of the Natural History Museum, becoming Head of the Meteorites and Cosmic Mineralogy Division. She is married to Professor Ian Wright who is one of the lead scientists on the Rosetta cometary mission and they have one son. She was awarded a CBE in 2012 for services to space sciences and asteroid (4731) was named "Monicagrady" in her honour.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the musician, Noel Gallagher.He was the principal songwriter of the band Oasis - his younger brother, Liam was the lead singer. Born to Irish parents, as a child he spent his summers visiting his mother's family in rural County Mayo, in sharp contrast to the Manchester council estate where they lived. He taught himself to play the guitar and loved music: he was road manager for the Inspiral Carpets before joining Liam in Oasis.Their debut album in 1994 marked the beginning of the band's rise to fame as part of the Britpop movement. In 1996 they played in front of 250,000 fans over two consecutive nights at Knebworth and following the Labour landslide in 1997, Noel attended what became known as the Cool Britannia party held in Downing Street by Tony Blair. Oasis won six BRIT Awards and two Ivor Novello Awards before disbanding in August 2009.He's since formed his own band - Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the poet and artist, Imtiaz Dharker.Winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for her work, her life seems a perfect reflection of the inter-relatedness of The Commonwealth. Born in Pakistan she was no more than a few months old when the family packed up their belongings and flew four thousand miles to start a new life - exchanging the blistering, dusty lanes of Lahore for the blustery, rain-slicked roads of Glasgow.Her father worked hard and, from scratch, built a big, successful business and a comfortable life for his children. But the immigrant fairytale came undone when his restless, well-educated, westernised daughter married in secret, running away to Bombay. Her parents disowned her and she would never see her mother again.Her work centres on themes of freedom, cultural intolerance, everyday life and gender politics.

Kirsty's castaway this week is the former England cricketer Andrew 'Freddie' Flintoff.One of the best players of his generation, he was part of the England team that won the Ashes in 2005, a year that marked his sporting coming of age. On the strength of that historic victory he was awarded an MBE for services to the game, and the public voted him BBC Sports Personality of the Year.Barely out of his pram when he picked up a cricket ball he turned out to bat for an under-14 match when he was just six years old. His debut was not in crisp cricket whites, but in a second hand Manchester United tracksuit, setting the tone for someone who's made a habit of doing things his way. Not least at a 10 Downing Street reception when, somewhat the worse for wear, he weaved into the cabinet room, plonked himself down in the PM's chair and knocked back yet another bottle of beer.Since retiring from the game he's had a go at heavyweight boxing and won the bout. One area where he hasn't come out on top: his sons never listen to his cricket coaching tips.Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty's castaway this week is the conductor and composer Harry Rabinowitz.His list of credits and collaborations read like a Who's Who of 20th century music - Gracie Fields, Charles Aznavour, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Matt Monro & Barbra Streisand are only a handful of the stellar names who've benefitted from his talents. He's conducted a lot of movie scores too, including Chariots of Fire and The Talented Mr Ripley; indeed the late director Anthony Minghella described him as "the UK's best kept secret".It wasn't an illustrious start; his first job was playing sheet music for prospective customers in a Johannesburg department store - he was fired after 6 weeks. His first go at conducting was enhanced not by an elegant baton of the finest Maplewood but a rolled up old newspaper. He's almost a hundred years old now, still plays the piano every day and only retired from the concert platform six years ago at the age of 94.Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Stephen Fry.Comedian, actor, writer, director, presenter & award-ceremony host - his list of accomplishments is long, varied and impressive. His younger years were troubled and with a propensity for stealing and lying, he was expelled from two schools and imprisoned for credit card fraud. The turning point came when he knuckled down and won a scholarship to Queens' College, Cambridge, where he read English and joined the Cambridge Footlights, becoming lifelong friends with Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie.His career highlights include the fruits of his collaborative work with Laurie - from A Bit of Fry and Laurie to Jeeves and Wooster, he played Lord Melchett in Blackadder and Oscar Wilde on the big screen. He is a best-selling author of fiction and three volumes of autobiography, is the voice of the Harry Potter audio books and presents BBC Two's QI. He has also spoken of his experience of mental health issues and in 2006 he made a documentary exploring the effects of living with Bipolar - it won an Emmy Award.Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Rebecca Adlington - Britain's most successful female swimmer.A multiple medal winner and record breaker she's packed a lot in at a young age, first grabbing the nation's attention by winning two golds at the Beijing Olympics and breaking a world record into the bargain. When she got back home she was granted the Freedom of Mansfield and the Mayor gave her a pair of golden shoes. The Queen opted for the more conventional approach, bestowing an OBE.She went on to win two more medals at the London 2012 Olympics and when all the cheering and flag waving had died down and the games were over she announced her retirement. She's hardly been a slouch since - appearing regularly on TV, getting married and in recent months getting ready for the birth of her first child, a daughter, who was born Monday 8, June, 2015. She's only 26.One of three sisters, family life was dominated by early morning training session at the local pool and it wasn't long before little Becky was out of the shallow end and heading for the fast lane ... The Sherwood Baths are now renamed The Rebecca Adlington Swimming Centre.Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Professor Lisa Jardine, academic, biographer and public thinker, is interviewed by Kirsty Young for Desert Island Discs.Historian, biographer, public thinker, mathematician - her proclivities are wide ranging and well regarded with prize winning books on subjects as diverse as Sir Christopher Wren, Seventeenth century Holland, Erasmus and women in the time of Shakespeare.Her current day job is leading the Department of Renaissance Studies at University College London, she's also a prolific writer and broadcaster. If that all seems a little ivory tower for your tastes think again; as Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority for many years she was at the sharp end of the complex conundrums and high emotion that surround the artificial creation of life, leading the world in developing the legal framework that governs IVF treatment. Her rigour and originality, then, are greatly admired and both seem to have been in evidence since the beginning - her schoolgirl contemporaries had pictures of Elvis by their beds. Lisa had other ideas, as a teenager she gazed lovingly at a photo of a brilliant mathematician. She says: "I only do things I love, and I love everything I do ..."Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Pamela Rose.Now aged 97, she was a Bletchley Girl who spent her war years working in total secrecy, painstakingly indexing snippets of information that would prove vital to the the war effort. Alan Turing and his fellow cryptanalysts would eventually break the Enigma Code and it's said that this breakthrough shortened the war by two years.Born into a musical family, she first took to the stage at boarding school. Pamela's lifelong ambition to be an actress was interrupted by the war and the invitation to work at Bletchley. Despite finding the work in the indexing section of Hut 4 something of a disappointment at first, she and her fellow workers still managed to have fun and she met her husband Jim at a hop when he asked her to dance. They married after the war and it wasn't until nearly sixty years later and after Jim's death that she would finally achieve her dream of acting on the West End stage. Producer: Cathy Drysdale.