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Join us on our quest for the extraordinary!
Sam McKee (@polymath_sam) has 9 university qualifications across 4 subjects including doctorates in history and philosophy of science and molecular biology. He researches both at two British universities and contributes to both space science and cancer research. Meet fellow polymaths and discipline leaders working on the frontiers of research from all over the world. Be inspired to pursue knowledge and drive the world forwards.
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Listen to us here and on podcast whilst you drive, exercise, do chores, and be inspired to pursue extraordinary in your own life.
www.sam-mckee.co.uk
Polymath World (00:01.076)
Hello and welcome to the Polymath World channel and once again we're touching on genetics, my favourite subject today and we're going to be looking at science communication with one of the best out there, Dr Kat Arnie who is a first-rate science communicator, brilliant at uncovering and unpacking genetics for people of all ages and it's fantastic to be joined with you today Dr Arnie.
Kat Arney (00:21.294)
Hello, really nice to be here, thank you.
Polymath World (00:24.522)
I'm so excited to talk about genetics with you and also how we can communicate it to the general public and help them see the wonder of what's going on. But at the start, would you mind telling us a little bit of your career journey?
Kat Arney (00:35.87)
Ooh, it depends how far back you want to go. Because I'm kind of one, the very beginning, the very beginning is like a super, super nerdy kid who's just really into like plants and...
Polymath World (00:38.536)
The very beginning.
Kat Arney (00:48.702)
nature and like science and the world around me but also doing creative things like kind of writing plays and books and all this sort of stuff. I had a chemistry set when I was quite young so in theory chemistry I guess is also a first love. I do love chemistry but it's not something that I chose to specialize in but I really love like the practicality of being able to do experiments. I was always trying to like make things and do things and test things so if you
My sister is a great mathematician and physicist and I think she has that abstracting brain to think about numbers and things in the abstract and I'm like if I can visualize it and get my hands on it
then we can do something with it. So that's really where I came from, a fascination with the world and how it works and what we can do and see and experiment with. So obviously then, nerdy kid, go and do nerdy things at school, do my science A levels and stuff like that. I took a year out before university to go and...
do year in industry. So I went to AstraZeneca as was, Zeneca Agrochemicals is now Syngenta and Bracknell. And that was really interesting because I spent a year working in a lab as a teenager. And it taught me a few things. It taught me one, that I am extremely clumsy and that should have been a sign. And it also taught me that maybe corporate science was...
not necessarily the direction I wanted to go in because it was very much note where we're doing this, we've got to do this, we've got to, you know.
Kat Arney (02:21.492)
fulfill these business goals. And at the time I was like, no man, like science should just be free and asking all these questions. It's interesting where I've ended up now working with life science companies. But we tend to work now with life science companies very much on like the discovery end where it still is that like, yeah, you know, we're trying to work towards a goal, but we're experimenting and playing and discovering and trying to do things that are right on the edge of what's.
what's possible a lot of the time. went to university, I went to Cambridge to degree in natural sciences, which is basically like a pick and mix science. did bits of physiology and bits of chemistry and bits of cell biology and all this kind of different stuff. I have a little confession though. So as a geneticist, I never actually did a proper course in genetics.
Polymath World (03:11.868)
hahahaha
Kat Arney (03:12.974)
So all the bits of genetics that I learned were a lot. There was a course called basically Cells. You said cells 1A and 1B. And then I did molecular zoology in my final year, which was kind of like molecular biology, a bit of genetics, bit of cell biology, bit of biochemistry. was...
It was a real, it was an amazing course because it was, it was undefinable. You learned about development, you learned about how genes work, you learned all this kind of stuff. And I think that really set me on a course of trying to integrate a lot of different ways of coming at things with trying to understand how the world works. So I don't ever really see things just through the lens of genetics and genetic crosses, although I have done a bit of that. Or like it's just about receptors.
transcription and I have done a bit of that. It's trying to see everything in the whole. So it was a really amazing degree for someone who is interested in a lot of things and how they all fit together. And so I did that, then I did a PhD in genomic imprinting. So this is like genomic imprinting, transgenerational epigenetics. This is back in the early 2000s when epigenetics was really weird. So this is like the difficult first album.
of epigenetics. don't know if you remember those times when suddenly it's like this kind of cool weird thing is Darwin wrong? Is Lamarck right? There's all these properties that are transmitted without genetics and I woohoo. So it was kind of exciting. It's kind of weird. Do you remember that time?
Polymath World (04:35.946)
Yeah.
Polymath World (04:44.692)
Wow.
Polymath World (04:48.478)
Well, I just remember it being sort of this fringe other module you could learn about. You had the main genetics here. And yeah, there's this thing called epigenetics. You should probably know about it, but this is the main thing. And that's an interesting sort of budding branch off the tree. That's sort of how it was.
Kat Arney (05:08.618)
Exactly. it was sort of two strands of it. was epigenetics as this weird transgenerational phenomenon. You know, can we inherit trauma? Can we inherit characteristics without genes? And that's very sort of weird, but also very like catnip to science journalists and like, was Darwin wrong? Kind of stuff. And then you had the side of it that was a lot of understanding how the modifications that are made to
not DNA itself, but all to the proteins that package DNA and enable the cell to understand which genes should we be using when and where and all that kind of stuff. And that sort of became then, I think, a lot of stamp collecting. There's lots and lots of different tiny, tiny variations in these proteins and modifications that can be made. And it felt like every week there was a different modification that affected how genes work in some different ways. So there's sort of these two strands.
running in parallel. So I always thought that was quite interesting is how do you go from these, these big questions about development and inheritance to this very sort of tiny, noodly, you change a little modification on the protein here and that changes how a gene is switched on and off. So I sort of had all that in my mind for quite a long time about this is really curious. And I think trying to make that connection between the big of
how life works and the very, small of like the tiny details of molecular biology. Like, how do we do that? That was always an interesting question to me. So then I did, I did my PhD. I did then two short post-docs because I couldn't figure out if the problem was with me or with science because I was not happy. And I was really struggling as a scientist to figure out like.
I'm just so interested in so many different things, but the discipline of having to focus really on one thing goes so deep in it, publish a paper on it, build on it, think of the next experiments to do. I struggled with that side of being an actual scientist because I was like, that's interesting, that's interesting, that's interesting, that's interesting, how do they all fit together, what can we do?
Kat Arney (07:26.158)
you know, how can we tell the stories? I got really into sort of stories and science communication and science writing. My mother was, her background is sort of in like English literature and things like that. So she always brought like the stories and the reading and the writing plays and that kind of thing and telling stories. And so I was getting really interested in science communication, doing schools events and all this kind of thing. And so then luckily I was able to get a job at Cancer Research UK.
doing science communication. So I went from my second postdoc into that. And that was amazing because Cancer Research UK is an amazing organisation. They're the biggest cancer research funder, charity cancer research funder in the world.
I was there at a time of incredible excitement and growth, not just in what we were understanding about cancer, like moving from single gene changes that affect inherited cases of cancer to like being able to look at whole populations and loads of genes and all this kind of stuff and the progress that was made in new therapies and targeted treatments. It was an incredible scientific time. And then it was also an incredible time in communications because suddenly you have things
like social media. So during the time I've been an active scientist and science communicator, we've seen not just these things, we saw them come in. So Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, which has been really big.
all these sort of social media channels, blogs. So Cancer Research UK, was there when we set up what was one of the first science blogs, certainly one of the first charity science blogs. I set up a Cancer Research UK podcast in 2006 before people listened to podcasts. So I'm very proud of it, but no one listened to it because you couldn't.
Polymath World (09:15.082)
you
Kat Arney (09:19.15)
There was no real way of getting podcasts onto people didn't really have mobile phones in the same way that we do now. Certainly not listening to tons of podcasts in the way we do. So it was a really exciting time of this explosion of communications tools that allowed organizations and also individuals to become their own science journalists, science broadcasters and this incredible time of science. was really amazing. I stayed there for 12 years.
And I moved around the charity a lot in terms of the kinds of work I did. So I worked with the marketing teams initially, like doing the cold marketing stuff that comes through your door and says, would you like to give two pounds a month to save children with cancer and all that kind of stuff. And trying to find scientific stories that would engage people, not just the heart wrenching, you know, here's a child with cancer, do you want to give us some money? But like, here's a really interesting science problem. And if we can get some money, we can...
do more and solve it. And I did a lot of like talks. I was a media spokesperson for a long time. So I'd go on the BBC breakfast sofa and then.
all of that kind of stuff, training a lot of our scientists and our internal team in science communication, working on the blog, setting up the blog with my colleagues Henry Scowcroft and also a guy called Ed Yong who now apparently is a Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist in America. that was also a fun and amazing time to work with incredible writers and editors as well. So I did that and then we get to like
2016 and so end of 2015 2016 and this is like the big change so my first big change was leaving the lab and then the second big change was leaving CRUK and I think within the space of about a year I had brought out my first book this is Herding Hemingway's Cats it's a book about how genes work
Polymath World (11:18.964)
Yeah.
Kat Arney (11:20.27)
I had quit my job, I'd gone freelance and I'd also left my husband so it was like woo let's and then I turned 14 like right okay everything just did it all at once like one year of massive change and yeah so my first book and I knew that when I brought that book out I wanted it to be the springboard into the next phase of my of my career
Polymath World (11:28.21)
Everything at once.
Kat Arney (11:47.778)
So I don't know if you've read that one as well. It's a bit dated now because it came out in 2016.
Polymath World (11:54.985)
I jumped straight to Rebel Cell because it was hot off the press when it came out and I loved that and was reading it and giving it to everyone. I've heard Heading Hemingway's Cats from your podcast but I haven't read the book unfortunately.
Kat Arney (12:08.181)
It's kind of the difficult first album of mine. So it was it was just this attempt to answer that question. Like we hear about genes all the time. We we hear that, you know, they are genes make us fat. They give us cancer. They make you vote Republican or whatever. But how do they actually work? And I was not seeing at the time any connection between in the in the popular media about
Polymath World (12:10.794)
Okay.
Kat Arney (12:36.974)
the concept of genes and then these genes that we inherit, how do they actually manifest in the body to do things? So how does a gene that makes you fat or gives you cancer, how does it do that? So this is sort of, it's only in retrospect I see like the themes in my curiosity. So it's like how you've got an organism, right? And it starts from one cell with one set of DNA.
that unfolds, like it's the same set of DNA, more or less, in all your cells. And you make a baby and then you make an adult and we have different organisms and different species and you know, we're all different. But you all start from this one fertilized egg with one set of DNA. Like, how the heck does that work? And how do we go from that to our understanding of genetic variations in populations and the genes we inherit and what that does?
to us and for us. So these, it's an attempt to do that. I think I was still very much in science communicator trying to do too much mode. So it's, I think it's a little more scientifically complex. It's the kind of thing that if you're starting at university, starting a degree in
molecular biology or biochemistry or genetics. It's like, it's a really good primer. In the same way, when I went to university, I got this long reading list that was all like Richard Dawkins and Steve Jones, and you should read these books. It's that kind of book. It's again, when I went to university, the Dawkins and Jones, they were a little out of date by then as well. So it's a little bit out of date, you know. I think CRISPR, which is now an incredibly powerful technology. You can edit any gene you like. I think I mentioned it in a footnote because it...
Polymath World (14:13.802)
Yes.
Polymath World (14:23.582)
Hahaha.
Kat Arney (14:23.884)
just started. So yeah, there's now a we've moved on a bit. Unfortunately, my publisher will not pay me to update it. So I'm not going to update it.
Polymath World (14:33.45)
But that's kind of the thing with genetics in the last 10-15 years is it has exploded. I don't know that any science has boomed and transformed as much as genetics. I say in general, biology is kind of in its biggest revolution since the 1950s because a lot of, you mentioned CRISPR, a lot of things have come along at the same time and they've had this snowball effect.
on each other, the computational stuff, bioinformatics, the fact that gene sequencing is so cheap and accurate and easy, you've got this data revolution. you were kind of releasing your, you've got four books and you're releasing them at a time when all of biology seems to be exploding as much as it ever has. So you've kind of had a front row seat, much with epigenetics as well when you were doing that too.
Kat Arney (15:31.072)
Exactly. Yeah, it's been amazing to see the change. So I actually, I went to a scientific conference earlier in the year. I did it for fun. They did invite, they did invited me to do a public lecture the night before. This is a conference up in Edinburgh called Dark Cell Hidden Genome, which is kind of very cool, but it's all about how
Polymath World (15:31.549)
a huge amount of change.
Kat Arney (15:55.31)
the bits of your genome, your DNA that are not genes, which is over 98 % of your genome. Like 2 % of your genome is actual protein coding genes that make the things that then build you. And the rest is a mix of stuff. And a lot of that is what I dug into in my first book is about like how all the rest of the genome directs.
the bits of the genome that make things to do things. And how our understanding of that is transforming and changing that we've gone from this concept of it being junk DNA that's just rubbish, does nothing to it's really, my God, all of it's really important to like, whoa, whoa, whoa, some of it's probably really important. Some of it is actual junk, but it was fascinating to go back, you know, 10 years later to...
Polymath World (16:38.334)
Yeah.
Kat Arney (16:47.478)
to this field and see what's come on. And some of like, the technologies have changed immensely. The amount, like you say, the volume of information, being able to do computational stuff with it, this big data that we can get from genomes, from sequencing, from like large scale interaction studies about what bits of DNA are talking to each other, all that kind of thing is amazing. And it was interesting to see what questions have been answered and what.
And still this question of how do our genes actually work? does this string of chemicals that we call DNA and we envisage to be a blueprint, instructions, code, how does that build an organism? We know more, but we're still not there yet.
So where have I got to now? I've got to my first book, I went freelance. So 2016 went freelance. That went really, really well. So I was like writing, broadcasting, making documentaries for Radio 4, making podcasts, all this kind of stuff. Started the Genetics Unzipped podcast for the Genetics Society. So that was a fantastic opportunity. And yeah, basically got more work than I could deal with.
Polymath World (17:58.165)
Yeah.
Kat Arney (18:07.06)
started to get people to help me and realized I was running a business. So that's where the agency started. And I don't know if you know anything about like the book publishing way of things. So I've written three books. The first is Rebel Cell. First is Herding Hemingway's Cats. The second is How to Code a Human, which is sort of a school library version of Herding Hemingway's Cats. And then the third one is Rebel Cell. But it takes years to go from having the idea for a book to actually
Polymath World (18:11.69)
Surprise!
Kat Arney (18:36.654)
the book coming out. So I pitched the idea of Rebel Cell basically almost as soon as my first book came out. So was like, right, the next one I want to do is the book that I've always wanted to write, which is about cancer and what is cancer? Where does it come from? Why is it so hard to treat them? Where is it going? And this was something that I'd always thought about when I was at Cancer Research UK. And again, this huge time of change in our understanding of cancer. I had quite a lot of problems.
selling this book to a publisher because my agent was like, this is a great idea. No one's talking about cancer as an evolutionary concept either. So we've, we're just getting all this understanding really since 2014 of how cancer evolves within the body of a patient and that if you treat someone, you may get all the cancer cells, but what doesn't kill them makes them stronger. So if you miss any, they're now resistant and
you've now got another problem. So we were really starting to understand cancer as an evolutionary phenomenon, understanding it not just as like one cell with mutations, but as a tissue that has gone awry. Our understanding that all your body is full of mutations that if we found those in a cancer, you'd say, aha, that is a mutation that is causing cancer. But actually your body, my body,
We're full of these mutations and yet those cells don't go wrong. So why? Why is cancer so much more common? Like the graph of cancer incidence is da da da da da. You hit about 60 and it goes woo. So what is that about? That is a biological phenomenon that we say, the rate of cancer increases as you get older. It's not a line. It's a woo. So what is that?
Polymath World (20:27.924)
Yeah.
Kat Arney (20:29.376)
what is that? That is really interesting. And no one was writing about this. The book, The Emperor of All Maladies came out 10 years earlier and every publisher we went to was like, yeah, but there's The Emperor of All Maladies and that's like the book about cancer. Why do we need a new one?
Polymath World (20:46.634)
A lot can happen in 10 years in the life sciences.
Kat Arney (20:51.982)
right? And you know what's happened in the past 10 years in cancer and our understanding of the genetics of cancer and our ability to like do like microscopy in three dimensions and all these kinds of things and integrate using computing, integrate all these different sources of data, genetic data, transcriptome data, which genes are active, the data about not just the genes but then the proteins that they make, being able to do this at scale.
integrate that with visual data microscopy about what do these cells and tissues look like and then put that all together. We can only do that now. We could not do that 10, 12 years ago. So I, sorry.
Polymath World (21:33.445)
I I mean, we haven't mentioned immunotherapy, but when I was an undergraduate, immunotherapy was talked about like it was a fairy tale. It was a myth. There's a professor who said, like, if you want your career to go absolutely nowhere, get into immunotherapy. And, know, it's a dead end. Like, it's just this strange, weird idea that there's probably nothing to it. And then, you know, less than a decade later, the Nobel Prize is awarded for it.
Kat Arney (21:51.146)
yeah.
Kat Arney (22:01.312)
Yeah, and that's been a fascinating story because I remember as part one of my jobs at CRUK, we would have to go and sit in the grant funding meetings and we'd be looking at these grants that were coming through and it's some of these sort of early studies of immunotherapy and it trying to provoke the immune system with things like modified viruses and stuff like that and kind of really worked. It was
You're sort of throwing money at this stuff. The results are terrible. It's not working and people are like I guess we can't get the immune system to recognize and destroy cancer cells. This is... we should be able to but whatever this approach is, it is not working and then suddenly, well...
None of these discoveries are ever sudden, right? It's like someone has made an observation 10 years ago and has spent 10 years plugging away trying to convince people. For a documentary I made, I made a three-part documentary series for Radio 4 about the past, present, and future of cancer based on the rebel cell. And we got to interview Jim Allen, who's the discoverer of immunotherapy, one of the co-discoverers, won the Nobel Prize for it. And he made this discovery that there are certain molecules that
stop the immune system from recognising cancer cells and that's the problem. So you can do all you like to, you know, try and alert the immune system to cancer, but as long as that fundamental recognition is not working, you are not going to be able to get the immune system to kill a cancer cell. And his insight was there are these molecules that stop it. If we block them, then it's game on. And talking to him about the journey that he had,
To get this even recognized, to get the investment, to get the money for the trials, when everyone was like, yeah, but we all know immunotherapy doesn't work, it was fascinating conversation. Well worth checking out, you can find them, yeah.
Polymath World (23:59.219)
It's an incredible story. really is. Rebel Cell, I found to be the perfect sort of medium between being very technical, but very accessible, even for younger students. That was what was so important in getting them interested and getting them to realize what was going on, that the world of cancer is kind of changing beneath your feet. It's not just cut it, burn it, or blast it anymore.
You know, you have DNA repair therapy. mean, like my own research in DNA repair and you've seen PARP inhibitors and all these other things come along, which are very, very successful. And it sort of seems like the future of cancer is aligning with the future of personalized medicine in a very, very exciting way where people are treated for their own unique physiology, their own genome is sequenced and then that...
sort of tailor-made medicine almost, which is very very exciting. But you had, if you don't mind me asking, you had a line in a of a post script at the end of Rebel Cell which I found really gave me pause for thought. You said, can we stop being so good at curing cancer in mice and it not working in humans? Because everyone I know in cancer research is using mouse models as well as...
Kat Arney (25:19.288)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Polymath World (25:24.19)
human cells. So I wanted to ask you specifically about that. What's the deal with us being amazing at curing cancer in mice and they're not working in people?
Kat Arney (25:33.006)
Yeah, I mean, this is so interesting. This is not a new or unique insight to me. I heard this at the NCRI, the National Cancer Research Institute conference, like, I don't 15 years ago, and it is still kind of true. So I think the issue is, is that obviously mice are not humans. So there's multiple reasons why animal models...
Well, there's multiple reasons why some of the cancer treatments that we've seen coming through, in fact, a lot of these very personalized, a lot of targeted therapies are not actually really moving the needle. And this is something that I explore a lot in, in rebel cell about these very, very targeted drugs that are targeted to very specific genetic mutations in cancers. The cancer just evolves around it. You know, it's like putting a dam in one part of the river. The river's just going around.
in the end, it's going to work its way through unless it's a massive, massive dam coming from several different angles and different ways. So that's, you know, that's, that's one idea, but there's, there's an issue. So mice, mice are not humans. And I go into this a bit about, it's not just mice are not just small humans. They, their whole, way that their biology works, they live fast, they die young, they have a lot of breeding. they, you know, they make big populations and then
they die young. That's the thing with mice in the wild and that is kind of how their biology has evolved. Humans, we live for a long time. We have to suppress cancer within us until this sort of very late stage in our lives. We don't have that many children. do stupid things like smoking and going in the sun and drinking too much. That doesn't help. Last time I looked, mice don't smoke. But there is fundamental differences in the underlying
biology of mouse tissue versus humans. And then you say, well, you can have all these genetically engineered models or we can like put human tumors into mice. it's like, yes, yes, yes, that is fine. But that is still an artificial system. And so if you're testing drugs in that system,
Kat Arney (27:48.654)
you're going to have a problem. You also have an added problem when you're trying to do things like immunotherapy, because the mouse immune system is not the human immune system. So we work with a company called Leads to Development. They're a consultancy that helps companies go from, okay, we've got an idea for drug, we've got a candidate, how do we get into clinical trials? And the normal journey, if you've got a small chemical drug, you test it in a couple of different animal species, like is this safe? Is this effective? You you test it in animal models, and then you go into humans.
But with a lot of drugs that are targeted at the immune system or antibody based drugs, the target may not even be in any animal species. And certainly if you're trying to have two targets, those may not be in any animal species and any model where you put human cells into the animal. It's not really, it's not really fair test, right? So, you know, if you're putting a drug into a mouse to see if there's side effects and that drug doesn't bind to anything in a mouse.
not going be any side effects. So, you know, I think we are starting to see a need for better models. There's a really interesting emerging class of companies that are developing like actual human laboratory models. I don't think we'll be able to do it all in silicone and computer and just model a human. I think I'm not sure I'd want to take a drug that had only ever been tested in a computer. I'd like
Polymath World (29:15.525)
Yes, me too.
Kat Arney (29:16.622)
I'd like it to have been through near some human tissue first before it comes to me. So yeah, I think we're seeing some really interesting, and this is, like you say, scientific advances drive, there's things like microfluidics, three dimensional tissue, culture systems, 3D printing of tissues and organs and all this kind of stuff. So I think that's, that's really the next frontier is developing drugs based on
much more integrated understanding of what cancer is and its place in a whole human tissue and a whole human body. A really fascinating company that I just worked with that's basically doing three, well, four dimensional imaging of three dimensional tumors. this is tumors over time in space, human tumors grown in this sort three dimensional system. And then
testing drugs to see, which do they actually work? Because we've done a lot of drug development that is, let's find a faulty molecule in a cancer cell, design a drug that hits it, and then we test it, and brilliant, know, because that should work, right? And we're seeing these drugs coming through in clinical trials and failing or not delivering really transformative outcomes. So moving to this.
way of drug discovery where it's like, right, let's actually look at actual cancers and see what actually works on the whole actual cancer without trying to think first about what pathway or anything we're targeting. It's like, well, let's find things that work first and then find out how they work later. Because the first thing we know is they work. So it's kind of, it seems dumb that we haven't done it that way, but it's been really hard to do that and do it at scale and the advances in technology and computing and AI to integrate.
that data to make the discoveries and then test them in more human systems. think it's just really, yeah, that's very exciting to me as well. I've gone off on a massive tangent here.
Polymath World (31:25.32)
yes, sorry. There's so much there. And I mean, we could talk all day about this, the subject, every aspect of it. It's highly likely that you'll need to do a rebel cell 2.0, you know, any year now. But in terms of communicating this, tying it to the science communication side, genetics is a funny subject because it's...
It fascinates people. I think in many aspects it also terrifies people. Coming off something like a pandemic, people have a strange mistrust of the life sciences and authority in general at the moment. And yet we're in this boom period where it's never really been as exciting as it is now. So how do you communicate the great advances?
in genetics to the general public, of all ages, shapes and sizes, and what are the biggest challenges there?
Kat Arney (32:28.302)
Ooh, that's a big question. So I think my general thing with communication is, I've suffered from this myself and sort of developed and thought about it a lot more, is that it's really tempting to just to fall into the what, like this is what it is. This is what we know about something and not really explain the why.
This is why this is interesting. This is why this is important. This is why we're doing this. This is where we're heading with it. This is what it will actually deliver. And that's the same for whether you're working for a charity, for a research institution or working for a company, you know, that's always explaining not just what it is, but why it's important and why you need to know this in your life because otherwise like...
you are just sort of shouting at someone basically. So always trying to think about why does someone need to know this? And then how do I, how do I get that in? How do I get the emotional hook? I teach a lot about storytelling. So I teach it for researchers. I teach it for startups and things like that. And so a lot of the problem is they're always coming and they want to talk about what, and I'm like, well, that's nice for you, but how is this actually going to make a difference?
And does who needs to know about the difference in the world that this is actually going to make? So I always think about story around this idea of like the switch, which is the change in the state of the world that your idea or innovation or research is engendering. Are we going from a sort of darkness into light rags to riches, these kinds of quite philosophical changes. And then that helps people to understand, oh, yeah, this situation, this is not good.
Through our innovation, we're actually changing it into a better state. So you start to understand why someone is trying to do this, because we are trying to get to a better place in the world.
Polymath World (00:02.07)
So communicating a really fast moving subject like genetics which has a lot of intrigue but also does scare people somewhat is a massive challenge. What are the biggest challenges that you find and what's the best solution?
Kat Arney (00:18.638)
So I think that it's understanding that when you're communicating with people, it's not just talking about what you're doing. It's explaining why you're doing it, why it's important, how you're actually trying to change the world and make the world a better place. And that is the sort of stuff that builds trust. So you're not just trying to impart knowledge, you're trying to impart understanding and build trust. Because I think we've seen
over the past kind of five years, probably a bit longer than that really. You could go all the way back to like the sort of the MMR crisis and things like that. A breakdown of trust in people just being told stuff. So like we're experts, we're just going to tell you what we're doing, the facts, and you just need to like know that and then you'll understand it.
really going to a much more sophisticated understanding of communication and what motivates communication. People don't just want to know things, they want to feel things. Emotions are important and understanding how to communicate the why of what you're doing. I teach storytelling a lot for scientists, startups.
And one of the things I really talk about is trying to find the switch, which is like the change in the state of the world that your idea, your innovation is actually trying to affect. So not just what you're doing, what you know about it. You know, these are the data, this is how it works. You should know this and think, you know, good for us. But why are we doing it and what we're trying to get to?
and engage people in that emotional story of, this is bad and I now understand why this first situation is not great. And now I understand that through what they're trying to do, we are trying to get to situation that is better. So I think that sort of thing, really communicating the why, not just the what. And some of that starts with actually setting up what is the problem.
Kat Arney (02:20.59)
honestly and being real about what the problem is, what are we trying to fix in the world and then how your innovation or research addresses that and then how is this actually going to make the world better because if you just say we're doing this you just need to believe this fine whatever you're not really going to engage people as much as bringing them on a journey with that story and making them feel something.
Polymath World (02:49.939)
I think with something like cancer, people are lot more willing to go with you and they want to listen and they're concerned because cancer's touched everyone's lives. Something like CRISPR, there's generally a lot more tension there. It makes for a great problem in sci-fi films and action thrillers and things like that or Netflix movies or whatever.
So I'll give you an interesting anecdote and I'd love to get your take on it. I was at Cambridge when the He Zhang Gui affair happened in 2019 and it was live, it was hot on the news and we had a day of lectures. Basically we cancelled our morning lectures to have an in-class debate and discussion about this and Jennifer Doudna had come out and...
condemned it, Francis Collins had condemned it. Yeah, well the whole Western world was saying, what are you thinking? Editing the genomes of a pair of unborn twins, this is crazy. And announcing it on YouTube. But the class, I think I was one of only a handful of people in the class who was sort of on team Doudna and Collins there saying, yeah, this is crazy, this is too fast.
The majority of my class, who were all genetic students obviously, were of the opinion of, well China's gonna do it anyway, Russia's gonna do it anyway, why should they get there first and reap all the medical and financial benefits? Like, it's crisp as out of the box, this has been done, let's just all do it. And I think the attitude of the genetic students would probably have been very different from the...
average Joe and average Jane on the street. There's two very different classes of people you're talking to there. So what do you make of that and how do you engage the more difficult challenges of genetics with the general public?
Kat Arney (04:58.862)
think that's absolutely fascinating. I'm really intrigued with that because there's sort of a bit in there of like, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, isn't it? because now from a genetics point of view, there's lots of scientific questions about what that editing actually was and is this actually, did they do what they said they did?
But yeah, think it does highlight the importance of that communication is also not one size fits all. You have different audiences. You need to work out who they are, how you're trying to talk to them, or what are you trying to say to them. And understanding actually what is motivating these audiences. So some people are going to be more...
conservative, some people are going to, it's sort of small c conservative or what like, Ooh, that sounds dangerous. Like we should be careful. And some people, and it's interesting that sort of younger people, it's like, well, no, this is, this is how we.
make our way in the world. This is how science and innovation progresses. And I'm absolutely sure if you went back to things like the early days of the Asilomar conference, when people had just discovered the basic technologies, the molecular biology revolution of the 60s about there are these enzymes and you can cut up bits of DNA and stick them back together again in different ways. And people were like, holy wow, we are rewriting life. Should we do this? Should we not do this? And there was a big massive
Polymath World (06:15.179)
Hmm.
Kat Arney (06:29.666)
international conference about it. And so I think that there's, it's important that those discussions that are happening at quite a high scientific level are coming down and being had at a more public level because there will be people who think, yeah, if this technology exists, we should be using it because other people are going to use it. It's the same with sort of discussions around
research into human embryos and all sorts of things. mean, so many technologies are like, should, not just can we do it, it's like, we can, but should we? It's the classic line from Jurassic Park, right? Your scientists thought they could do it, they never stopped to ask whether they should. But I think it does highlight the importance and this whole scientific science communication world of the past.
Polymath World (07:06.686)
Yes.
Kat Arney (07:18.968)
I think 20 years really from my career in science comms has been thinking about public engagement, not just, we've moved from public understanding of science where you just, in the manner of a foreigner on holiday, just shouting more and more loudly in English in a restaurant, from that sort of public understanding, like we will tell you things and you will understand. And if we speak loudly and slowly enough, you will get it and you will come on board with us to...
Polymath World (07:35.339)
Yeah.
Kat Arney (07:46.446)
public science communication, where we're trying to be a bit more clever with it, to public engagement. And science should, I think, proceed by broad consensus. You're never going to make everyone happy. And I don't know if there are any things that are absolute, you should never do this. I think there are some things that people think that are actually scientifically never going to work.
And I think there are things where stuff involving like human embryo engineering that's involving a lot of human tissue and human embryos and human women and all these sorts of things. I think there are very, very big ethical questions there that the risks are not.
worth the benefits, ethical risks, scientific risks, practical risks. But I remember as well, so when I was doing, I did a science communication diploma in the early 2000s. And back then the big kind of fear was there was a lot of talk about GM. So worried about GM crops and GM foods. And that seems to have broadly gone because there's been enough proof that these things are safe and also they're valuable and people vote with their wallets and.
Polymath World (08:53.087)
Yes.
Kat Arney (09:05.389)
know if it's cheaper and it's safe and it's nice most people are going to have it.
Polymath World (09:10.675)
Yeah, if it's more environmentally friendly in terms of climate change and stuff, then people will eat lab-grown meat and all those sorts of things. So it's a different world now.
Kat Arney (09:18.99)
Yeah, exactly. And that's explaining the why. So it's not just, oh, they're putting genes in our food now. Our food's always had genes in it, spoilers. But like, you know, not just that we're, we're doing this, but why? What is the end output of this?
I think where people do get quite tangled up and it's interesting working now. So we work with, we still work with some charities and research institutions. We've worked with a lot of life science companies. So these are organizations that, you know, they need to make money so that they can develop and deliver their innovations. And are people more or less skeptical when there's money involved? you need to spend money.
to do science. Like at Cancer Research UK, people were like, why do you need so much money? And it's like, well, you need to pay scientists to do stuff. You need to buy equipment. Like cancer research doesn't just happen because of the vibes. And so I think that there's, it's really important for, particularly for commercial companies to be explaining why they're trying to do something. it's on.
It's on us as the people that work with them and it's on them to like, you should be doing things that are ethical and trying to make the world a better place, I think. So that's important.
Polymath World (10:37.183)
Yeah, people often get captured by headlines or they only read the headline if they see it, if it makes its way into their echo chamber somehow of social media or wherever they get their news. And you mentioned Jurassic Park and you did the Genetic Society podcast for a long time. You and I both been part of the Genetic Society for a while. we've got Svante Parvo coming to the conference this year, which is
is wonderful, man who won the Nobel Prize three years ago for sequencing the Neanderthal genome. I was involved in a radio debate about de-extinction, George Church and bringing back willy mammoths and all of that. someone, know, General Garland on the street basically said, this is amazing. We can do Jurassic Park now because we've got Neanderthal genomes and we're bringing back willy mammoths. So how soon until we bring dinosaurs back? And I was like,
There's a couple of details I think you've missed here, but I worry, and this is why what you do is noble work, and we need a lot more people like you doing what you do. The gap in genetics between the public knowledge of where the technology is and where the technology actually is is as big as any gap in science, I think. Right now, this seems to be the biggest gulf.
What more can be done? Is it just a case of needing more science communicators or getting a hold of the headlines or finding new ways of doing the same thing? What do you think?
Kat Arney (12:20.214)
I'm always someone who will advocate for more science communicators. That's my job, that's what I do. I think it's interesting. so I think that there's a really important role for enabling more communication, but on many different levels, different channels and different audiences. Cause I, you we just talked about your students versus the person on the street.
There are different audiences and we've seen such a fragmentation of people's media consumption. you know, from, used to be like, there's the BBC and the broadsheet newspapers. And now there's this hugely fragmented ecosystem. Some people get all their information from TikTok. Some people get all their information from YouTube. Some people get all their information from Facebook. My dad, you know, there's, there's a huge fragmentation.
And so supporting science communication, we do need more science communicators that can work across these different levels and different mediums with a really deep understanding of the medium and how it works. And this is going to take money. It is going to take investment. And it does frustrate me that science communication is so often still seen as like a bolt on. It's given a tiny budget.
You know, we work with a lot of companies and they never even put like comms and marketing or anything in their budget. And then we say, well, to do this well, it will cost this much. they're like, what? All right, we'll just carry on like posting out a tweet once a week and see how that works for you. So I think organizations that have the...
the funds to do this and recognising that this is really, really important work and it has to be authentic, it can't be cringe. It's got to be authentic to the channels that you're trying to reach and doing this kind of story impact, getting, answering the questions that people in these places are asking, not just, I'm going to tell you something now, that understanding of the medium and supporting people that are working in these mediums, I think is, is
Kat Arney (14:33.726)
really like the fragmentation of the media ecosystem we need fragmentation of science communication I think.
Polymath World (14:38.955)
There's two things you just reminded me of that I'd also love to get your take on in terms of science communication. One of my biggest issues with science communication with genetics is it doesn't seem to happen too early in schools. Most of the school's work that I do, people who are doing biology A level, they're heading towards medicine or they've picked it because they enjoyed it.
There's not that many students I meet who want to become scientists and get into science research at 15, 16 years old. And I don't get the impression that genetics as its own subject really comes up that seriously in the school curriculum that early. Can you remember what age you were when genetics was really introduced to you and what age you were when you just...
thought, wow, this is is my subject. I ended up in genetics basically by accident. I'd meant to do marine biology, couldn't find a course. So I picked evolutionary biology, thought I'll switch to marine biology at master's level. There weren't enough people to run the course in the first terms. They just said, I'll just do genetics instead for now. And that was it for the rest of my life. You know, day one, hour one, lecture one.
I fell hard in love. was like, where have you been all my life? But I was at university and I don't get the impression it really comes up early. we need to get them earlier and do we need to do that better?
Kat Arney (16:19.126)
Yeah, I think it's tough because there's some interesting levels of concepts about how you teach it and there's some really interesting work going on about genetics education and how we...
teach the science of inheritance because I think you've got so many different levels of it because you've got genetics as the science of inheritance and inherited traits and like how does our biology make us who we are or make a mouse what it is or a fruit fly what it is and then you've got like the sort of the really noodly molecular biology stuff which is more the stuff that I'm interested in but probably it's not very relevant or interesting and or necessary for the broad
like the broad public to know because really at school and particularly before people have split out into their more specialisms later in education. So I think that this, the teaching of how we teach about inheritance and how we teach about biology and how we are made and how organisms are made, I think that there are...
there are ways to do it that are very much led by sort of the curiosity.
rather than like right you have to sit down and learn how to do a fruit fly cross because also you you learn these very like discrete examples of genetics i did my mendelian crosses and and all of this and then like it turns out that most of biology is absolutely not like that you know you do a mendelian cross and you're like yeah there's this and big a and little a and all this kind of thing and and you should get this one to three to one ratio whatever ratio of this and then you look at your own family and go
Kat Arney (18:04.056)
Well, clearly it doesn't work like that. So moving away from this of Mendelian view of genetics to a much broader variation based view of genetics and understanding of sort of traits and inheritance in that way and much more sort of mushy understanding that really matches people's experience and broadly in any form of communication when the things that you're telling someone does not match up with their experience of the world.
Polymath World (18:07.211)
you
Kat Arney (18:34.126)
you have a problem. And so I think that particularly genetics, the way it's taught in this very Mendelian way does not match up with what people see in the world. So all the questions that I used to get asked about genetics is like, yeah, but I color, but like I've got this hair color or this eye color. Like when my family aren't like that, like, yeah, cause it's nothing like you learned at school. So maybe there are some really, there's some really interesting work going on. think particularly it leads university about more non Mendelian teaching.
And so I think that is interesting. I think what do people need to understand about to live a life as you can get into the philosophy of science communication and why should people know about science? And it's like, you know, because people vote on scientific issues, because people need to take control of their own health and their own family's health. So what are the things that children need to learn about how biology and how inheritance and how genetics works that will serve them?
And then also, you know, how do we then develop the people who are really interested in that, that there is a way forward. The other thing that I think is interesting having done science at school, and obviously I did it a long time ago, and I don't know what's changed now, is that there are many, many more things you can do with science than just be a scientist. And this idea of like alternative careers for science kind of started to become a big thing when I was leaving the lab, like, you know,
Kat Arney (20:05.626)
2004, 20 years ago, we started to realize like, not everyone who does science stays in science. And so instead of having that massive disillusionment where like, oh God, I've spent my whole life doing science A levels and a science degree and even a PhD and now I am useless because I can't, I don't want to be or I can't be an academic scientist. Right from the start saying science is really useful to you in all aspects of your life.
If you do want to pursue studying science more, there are so many things that are open to you. It is not just being a scientist in a university staring down a microscope. You can work for a biotech company, you can work in medicine, you can work in policy. I don't know, find me the 18 year old that's like, yeah, policy. That's my thing. But it is for some people. you know, this is the policy is the manifestation of how do ideas actually become the ways that we live, right?
So yeah, think some of that, like what can you do with science and scientific knowledge as well? I think that's quite an exciting idea.
Polymath World (21:07.787)
Hmm.
Before we finish on a good note, I did want to ask one other thorny question because unfortunately a lot of time we're not working on a blank slate and we're in an era of misinformation and pseudoscience unfortunately. I was talking to the science communicator Dave Farina who runs channel Professor Dave Explains. Very good channel that helped me get through my immunology module. But he highlighted a...
an issue in the US that sort of went everywhere where a creationist ministry basically which had some veneer of credibility put out a very twisted analysis of a paper about chimpanzee genome versus the human genome and said, this latest scientific paper says that we're not 99 % similar, we're actually only 84 % similar.
Evolution's a lie, blah blah blah blah blah. And unfortunately, because people don't take the time to read the scientific literature and see how this paper had been misconstrued, every sort of creationist other ministry around the world was repeating this everywhere, and it was doing the rounds, and it was quite shocking. That's just one example from last month of how pseudoscience, particularly around genetics, can do the rounds. So...
We're not working from a blank slate and not just in this era of mistrust but in misinformation. What more can we do?
Kat Arney (22:47.502)
Yeah, that stuff's really frustrating. It's interesting you say that, because I kind of cut my teeth in science communication, arguing with creationists online in like, yeah, like 2019. Not 2019. I'm messing my years up. Like 1999, I was like on the very early internet, arguing with creationists. So yeah, it's like, wow, yeah, long time ago. So this...
Polymath World (22:57.355)
Bless you.
Polymath World (23:10.452)
Wow.
Kat Arney (23:17.186)
And some of it is actually understanding what these people are trying, where they're coming from. And I've spent a lot of my time at CREK and since then I was kind of the alternative medicine person as well. So I saw it as my job as a science communicator at CREK, not to just look at, know, alternative treatments or things that seemed a bit like, well, that's a bit strange, that people were flagging to us and not just go like, well, that's just clearly all bullshit.
but go like, what is this? What is in there? What is, how do we actually understand what people think about this and why do they need to think it? So there's that side of like, creationists, why do creationists need to believe this? Why do people with that sort of fundamentalist faith, why do they need to believe that evolution is not true? And it's understanding that they,
If you're a biblical literalist and any part of the Bible is not true, then how do we know that any of it's true? Right? So it's not really about they're trying to prove evolution wrong, it's that they are desperately trying to hold on to the understanding that their faith is real and unshakable. So it's not about the science, it's about the belief and the emotion and what it's doing for them. understanding that why.
helps you think about what are narratives that then counter that. So, you know, just telling someone like, well, evolution is clearly true, you just don't understand the paper enough. And coming from scientists that is not going to work. But what about people who have religious faith saying, I do not find this data contradicts my faith. Because it's
Polymath World (25:05.277)
It shouldn't. It shouldn't do.
Kat Arney (25:07.286)
Yeah, so it but that you can explain evolution and, you know, comparative genetics and taxonomy till you're blue in the face. But you're not actually understanding what the deeper issue is that it's not about whether this science is true or not. It's about you are attacking the fundamental basis of my faith. So narratives that say, the fundamental basis of my faith is not shaken by this. Here's why and here's like
actually this tells us something wonderful about world or you know that that sort of understanding is I think quite useful and there's sorry
Polymath World (25:46.284)
You've touched on it there with the word you used in wonder. is a lot of it, and obviously David Attenborough's and Brian Cox's and also Richard Dawkins in his writing does this very well, cultivating a wonder and a love and a healthy respect for science as well can do a lot of the legwork, can't it?
Kat Arney (26:10.668)
Yeah, the universe is incredible. At my wedding that I then got divorced from, one of the readings was The Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan, which I think is incredible because it's arguing against, God, we've gone really deep here, isn't it? Like the sort of the nihilism of like, you know, it's all just physics and it's all, know, none of this means anything because we're just like...
Polymath World (26:21.386)
wow.
Kat Arney (26:38.08)
monkeys in human suits on a planet that's one of millions in the infinite universe that's uncaring and then you die, right? It's an argument that says the connection, the wonder, the things that we see around us, this is all what gives us meaning.
And whether you find like a deeper spiritual meaning, you need to like add a layer of higher power onto that. Brilliant, knock yourself out. Like I think people who have faith are amazing because that is helping them live in the world that we all have to live in. If you don't have faith and you can have that understanding of the wonder and the connectedness through biology, like DNA.
I started with that first single organism. That's, God, we've gone really philosophical. Like that connection to our first universal ancestor is what connects us all and all the life on this planet. you know, I'll leave you with that sort of little tingly feeling there. But if we can get that sense of wonder across, but creating, you know, the people who are really nuts about it, always going to be nuts. And I think there is something about trying to work out what is a narrative.
Polymath World (27:27.947)
It's great when that happens.
Polymath World (27:38.187)
Just that.
Kat Arney (27:51.138)
that really counters what is the issue is going to help.
Polymath World (27:56.684)
stem from your perspective what you're most excited about in terms of the future.
Kat Arney (28:02.263)
What are we most excited about? I am very excited about some of the technologies that are actually starting to be usable at scale and deliverable at scale now. So we work with a lot of really exciting kind of startups in biotech, tech bio, which is like the fusion of things like AI and biology. And so I am really excited about what they can do.
One of the really exciting companies that we work with are an Oxford based company called Assembly, and they're using generative AI. So like kind of track GBT, but to design immunotherapies, proteins, basically. So I think this intersection of these kinds of technologies that allow us to be more creative, come up with different iterations. So you can give this AI, you can say, here's the sequence of a, an immunotherapy drug. Give me 20 different versions.
that might be better. They might not be better, you still have to make them and test them in the lab. But it's using, it's being able to test and iterate and integrate many, many, sources of data to come up with new things, some proteins that have never even been seen in biology. So I think that stuff is really exciting about what can AI enable us to create.
I think we're entering the creator phase of biology, like synthetic biology, CRISPR, being able to chop up DNA, re-engineer the systems within cells, to make products to do things, get bacteria that can decontaminate landfill, can turn carbon in the atmosphere into fuel. All these things, I think we're entering this really exciting creating phase in biology. So I think that's what really excites me.
Polymath World (29:55.628)
Yeah, it feels like we're on the tip of, even though we're in an explosive period, the tip of like something really taking off. I say to students, it's never been a better time to get into biology or cancer research. You're very, very fortunate. Where can people find you? Where can they find your work and your books and your programs?
Kat Arney (30:16.43)
So the main social media channel I'm on is LinkedIn. Because that's what I do now. If you want to find me on social media, am on LinkedIn. I'm also on Blue Sky. So those are the places where I hang out. You can find my books. That's Herding Hemingway's Cats, How to Code a Human and Rebel Self from All Goods and All Evil Bookshops. And you can find the Genetics Unzipped podcast at geneticsunzipped.com. We no longer make it sadly, but there's like a hundred episodes.
for you to get your teeth into. And yeah, and if you're interested in my science communication agency, First Create the Media, we are online at firstcreatethemedia.com. We work with startups, scale ups, amazing pioneering life science organizations to help them figure out that who you're trying to talk to, what do you need to say, and why should they listen to you? So that's what we do.
Polymath World (30:47.403)
Great resource, really great news.
Polymath World (31:09.131)
amazing. Go check it out. They're all fantastic. can't recommend Genetic Sunzipped and Rebelstyle any more. It's really, really terrific work you do. And thank you so much for doing it and for joining me here today.
Kat Arney (31:21.422)
Thank you, this has been a lot of fun, cheers.