NHS National Plan Task Force, the National Crime Prevention Board and the Crime Prevention Agency Board). He was a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1999–2005 and a member of the council's Working Party on Ethics of research involving animals (2003–2005). Ross contributed the foreword to Edzard Ernst's 2013 book on complementary and alternative medicine, Healing, Hype or Harm?: A Critical Analysis of Complementary or Alternative Medicine. Ross described himself as a 'sceptic' but 'not a cynic' and that 'pseudomedicine should be exposed for what it is'. Ross campaigned against Lord Maurice Saatchi's Medical Innovation Bill. Ross spoke against the bill in a 2015 debate hosted by HealthWatch, saying that "Uncoordinated trial and error on individual patients will never cure cancer and even if it did we would never know because these aren't controlled conditions...There is a long roll call of dishonour where lack of systematic science did harm". Ross is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, and of the Royal College of Surgeons, a Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and a non-executive director of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. He has been a member of the Committee on Public Understanding of Science, chairman of the Royal Society Prizes for Science Books (twice), Guest Director of the Cheltenham Science Festival, chairman of the National Road Safety Committee of RoSPA and is an affiliate of the James Lind Alliance. He is Chairman of the Wales Cancer Bank Advisory Board, president of several charities including HealthSense (formerly HealthWatch), and a Trustee of Crimestoppers, of Sense about Science and of the UK Stem Cell Foundation. He was a member of the Ethics Standards Advisory Panel for onCore (the UK tissue bank), and an adviser to Crime Concern and Victim Support. He served two terms as an Ambassador for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) 2004–11. He is President of the Kensington Society and a patron of Prisoners Abroad (a registered charity which supports Britons detained overseas), and a range of other charities including the Animal Care Trust, British Wireless for the Blind Fund, Heartbeat, the Jewish Association for the Mentally Ill, the Kidney Research Aid Fund, the Myasthenia Gravis Association, the National Depression Campaign, Missing, NICHS, the Raynaud's & Scleroderma Association, Resources for Autism, SaneLine, the Simon Community Northern Ireland, and Young at Heart. He has campaigned for sprinklers in social housing, chaired fire sector