Dr Michael Mosley is one of Britain’s most well-known doctors, who rose to fame with television appearances and a string of best-selling diet books.
A major operation was launched to find the famous doctor after he vanished while hiking alone in Greece on Wednesday.
This morning police discovered of a body at Agia Marina around 30 minutes walk from Pedi where he was last seen.
Officials said the coroner had been informed and was travelling to Symi from Rhodes. It has not yet been confirmed if the body is his.
Born in Calcutta, India, Dr Michael Mosley attended boarding school in England before reading PPE at Oxford.
His father worked as a banker in Hong Kong and the Philippines and he said it was part of the overseas banking culture for parents to send their children to boarding school.
But Dr Mosley told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2019 that his mother Joan was ‘heartbroken’ at sending him away and said she would rather have kept him and his older brother John at home.
He told the paper his mother imbued all her children with ‘strong ethical views’.
The doctor said he was taught as a child that his family was ‘very privileged and we owed it to society to give something back’.
In his personal life, Dr Mosley revealed his first kiss happened at the age of 14 during a summer romance with a girl in Hong Kong.
He tried his hand working as an investment banker before retraining as a doctor. He wrote on his website he realised investment banking ‘wasn’t the industry for him’ before deciding to retrain.
He told the British Medical Journal: ‘I decided then that my primary interest in life wasn’t making money for myself or other people. I was passionately interested in what makes people tick… and I actually went into medicine intending to become a psychiatrist.’
Dr Mosley studied medicine at the Royal Free Hospital in London, and although he enjoyed his medical studies he became disillusioned after a disappointing practical placement.
He recalled: ‘When I did my psychiatry placement, I didn’t find it as enticing as I’d hoped it would be, and the general mood of psychiatry at that time was not very positive. I went into it with huge hopes and beliefs, and then it became more obvious that there were severe limitations to what you could do.’
He then joined the BBC as a trainee assistant producer.
Dr Mosley made a string of science and history documentaries over 25 years, rising to become a presenter and an executive producer at the corporation.
In his journalistic career he has worked alongside the likes of John Cleese, Jeremy Clarkson, Professor Robert Winston and Sir David Attenborough.
He devised and was executive producer on three of the most popular science and history programmes of the past decade: Pompeii – The Last Day, Supervolcano and Krakatoa.
As a presenter he made a dozen series for the BBC, including Medical Mavericks, Blood and Guts, Inside Michael Mosley, Science Story, The Young Ones, Inside the Human Body, Eat, Fast Live Longer, The Truth about Exercise, Pain, Pus & Poison and The Genius of Invention.
He is also working as a presenter on Trust Me, I’m A Doctor on BBC 2. Alongside his screen work, Dr Mosley is well known for his dietary advice after publishing bestselling plans including The Fast 800 and the 5:2 Diet.
Following the success of Eat, Fast & Live Longer, Dr Mosley co-authored a book called The Fast Diet with Evening Standard journalist Mimi Spencer in 2013.
He is one of the leading advocates of intermittent fasting, low carbohydrate and ketogenic diets.
The diet doctor has also published a book on using diet to improve sleep, called Fast Asleep, after revealing he suffered from chronic insomnia.
He comes from a long line of missionaries, but has said in the past the closes he came to religion was incorporating fasting into his diet.
Dr Mosley regularly appears on his podcast Just One Thing as well as the BBC’s The One Show.
His latest book, The 8-week Blood Sugar Diet, was published in December 2015 and became an international bestseller.
He has won numerous awards, including being named Medical Journalist of the Year by the British Medical Association in 1995.
As well as having a column in the Daily Mail, Dr Mosley writes for The Mail on Sunday, The Times and The Independent. He is a regular columnist for Focus magazine and Eureka.
He married Clare Bailey in 1987, after meeting in medical school at the Royal Free Hospital in London. She was 18 and he was 23.
They now have four children together. He has described how Clare is more of an extrovert than him, describing her as having an ‘enormous amount of social energy’ who would be happy to stay out until 5am.
In their relationship Dr Mosley has said how he tends to have big ideas but she puts them into practice and often was the one writing the recipes in his books.
Their daughter Kate has been described by Dr Mosley as ‘exactly like her mother’. The couples also share three sons, Alex, Jack and Daniel.
Dr Mosley and his wife, who is also a Mail columnist, have just completed a nationwide tour together called: ‘Eat well, sleep better, live longer.’