Private Passions

The science writer and broadcaster Dr Kat Arney shares with Michael Berkeley her passion for the harp and her revelatory new research into the causes of cancer.Gone are the days when cancer could not be mentioned but was “the Big C”. It is just as well, since about half of us will develop cancer during our lifetime. And as the treatments and drugs improve all the time, so does our knowledge of what causes it. Kat Arney’s latest, award-winning, book, Rebel Cell: "Cancer, Evolution and the Science of Life", explains the revelatory new breakthroughs happening in labs around the world.After a PhD in Genetics at Cambridge University, Kat Arney worked for ten years as Science Communications Manager at Cancer Research UK. And then she left that job to go freelance - writing books and newspaper articles about science, broadcasting and podcasting including a recent Radio 4 series, Ingenious, about how individual genes shape our lives.But as well as science Kat Arney has another passion, for music, and particularly the