Ali Bakran was a consultant and vascular surgeon at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital when he drowned while on holiday in the Maldives. He was born in Hyderabad on 15 January 1949 but his family moved to the UK and settled in Salford when he was a small boy. He attended primary school in Salford and then went to Manchester Grammar School. He studied for his BSc in anatomy at Bristol University and qualified MB ChB at Leeds University in 1973. He held surgical posts at Hull and Leeds and joined the higher surgical rotation in Manchester in 1980, moving to Liverpool nine years later as a consultant. He developed a close relationship with the biomedical engineering department at the university and was involved with research projects on vascular access. Another major interest was the study of opportunistic viral infections in transplant patients. In all, he contributed 86 research papers to the literature on a range of clinical and laboratory based topics. In the mid 1990s he helped set up the European Vascular Access Society (EVAS) and was treasurer of the British Transplant Society. He was the founder president of the VASBI (Vascular Access Society of Great Britain and Ireland) which he established in 2009 because of the need to have a multidisciplinary organisation committed to the promotion of vascular access for haemodialysis. The membership was to include vascular surgeons, transplant surgeons, nephrologists, radiologists, dialysis nurses, sonographers and vascular scientists; the inaugural meeting was, tragically, the month after he died. VASBI are now holding annual meetings and training sessions; their current president, Steve Powell, is an interventional radiologist who had been Bakran's partner in developing the excellent outcomes achieved by Liverpool's vascular access service. A member of the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh he became an ambassador for the College in Africa, visiting various countries to promote co-ordination in surgical training. He was a passionate supporter of Manchester United and enjoyed playing tennis, listening to classical music and eating Indian cuisine. He was remembered for his enthusiastic participation in the annual Snowden hike to promote organ donation. Having fought to overcome his own impoverished background he was keen to improve access to medical education for those from similar backgrounds and set up the charity Aequitas which he was hoping to make his second career after retirement. He was on a two week holiday in the Maldives with his wife and daughter when he drowned while snorkelling. He died on 27 August 2010 aged 61, survived by his wife, Diane, son Adam and daughter Miriam, mourned by his colleagues and by his patients to whose care he had been devoted. His registrar remarked "In transplant surgery we follow the patients throughout life…..he would bulldoze his way for [them]".