RealOne

Andrew Veitch is a freelance science journalist based in London. His fields of expertise are medicine, the environment and chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. He now works mainly in television producing, writing and presenting documentaries for BBC World in association with Richard Wilson and Anya Sitaram at Rockhopper Productions. These are high-quality, high-speed documentaries filmed and edited with some of the best people in the country and produced in cooperation with organisations such as Unicef.

Veitch would write more for print media if he wasn't so lazy, speaks at conferences if he absolutely has to, and in his spare time helps to run the stunningly-successful Saturday market in Broadway Market, Hackney, East London.

Despite his age, he travels well and prefers to work in cold remote places - the poles, Siberia and Alaska. Hot is also good - the Cameroon Highlands, Lake Malawi and anywhere in Brazil. He will go absolutely anywhere on a boat.

He quit as Science Correspondent for Channel Four News (the leading news and analysis show on British television) in '03 after a 15-year stint which took in Aids, climate change, Sellafield, BSE, the sequencing of the human genome, the Foot and Mouth epidemic, two Gulf wars and finally the awful death of one the few people who could have verified that Saddam Husain had no remaining chemical and biological weapons, Dr David Kelly.

Before joining Channel Four News, Veitch spent virtually his entire working life on the Guardian, finally as Medical Correspondent. He was among the first to cover the emergence of HIV and the advent of in vitro fertilisation. In a varied past, he has also been a features sub, feature writer, and theatre critic for the Guardian and Capital Radio in London. He has published just one slim book, The Naked Ape, an anthology of sexism based on a column he ran while working for Liz Forgan on the Guardian's women's page back in the seventies (the book was remaindered some years ago).

Oh, and the name is Scottish so it's pronounced Veetch.

Credits

In '05 Veitch produced and presented a six-part series on HIV in association with Rockhopper for BBC World, featuring families and children living with the virus in six countries. In '06 he produced and presented a special edition of the Kill or Cure series on neglected parasite diseases including schistosomiasis and filariasis.

His work has been honoured by, among others, the Royal Television Society (for exposing the nuclear disaster at Mayak, the old Soviet nuclear bomb factory); the British Association for the Advancement of Science; Wildscreen; OneWorld; the New York film and television festivals; the Terence Higgins Trust for his reporting on Aids in the Guardian; and he has won a record seven British Environment and Media Awards mainly for his films from Antarctica, the Arctic and Russia.

His academic qualifications are meagre: a scraped Bachelor of Social Science degree at Trinity College, Dublin.