Kat Arney

Early in 2012, Rodger Novak took a call from Emmanuelle Charpentier, co-discoverer of CRISPR-Cas91 - a DNA editing tool that has shot from the pages of academic journals to world renown in four years. "She asked me what I thought of CRISPR. I didn't understand," he recalls. "I said, 'What's CRISPR?'"
Charpentier outlined to him exciting results that were starting to come out of her lab, building on a paper she published back in 2011 in the journal Nature2 looking at how bacteria use the CRISP...

Data from personal bio-monitoring devices such as fitbands and smart watches, when combined with genetic information, could be a powerful tool in medical research. But what will all this tell us about ourselves. Science writer Kat Arney finds out.
Thanks to advances in DNA sequencing technology, researchers around the world are now faced with a deluge of genetic data gathered from hundreds of thousands of people.
Despite the headlines claiming to have found "genes for" everything from alcohol...

Biobanks are big news and big science. Built from huge cohorts of volunteers who are interviewed, measured and then monitored for decades, biobanks enable scientists to create a detailed picture of genetic, lifestyle and environmental influences on health.
Decades of collaboration between NDPH researchers and Chinese scientists have now grown into the China Kadoorie Biobank (CKB) – a long-term prospective study involving more than half a million participants recruited from ten diverse areas a...

Every year, more than 50,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with breast cancer. Thanks mainly to advances in treatment, death rates have halved since the 1970s and survival is continuing to improve year on year, particularly for cancers diagnosed at an early stage. Much of the credit for this impressive achievement can be traced back to a team of dedicated statisticians working in the Oxford Clinical Trial Service Unit (CTSU, now part of the NDPH).
By pulling together results from hundreds of...

For the thousands of people in the UK with diabetes, foot ulcers are a huge problem — at least one in ten will develop one at some point and a quarter of them will require amputation of all or part of the foot.
But a new camera could spot these dangerous ulcers before they show up.
The device, roughly the size of a regular camera, has temperature sensors that detect ‘hot spots’ on the feet. These indicate an ulcer may develop in a few days or weeks.
Ulcers are infected sores that develop due ...

Stacks of little plastic dishes in a laboratory incubator, each one holding a free-floating blob of human brain might sound like the stuff of science fiction. But this is no futuristic flight of the imagination: these strange creations, known as brain organoids, are already being cultivated in labs all over the world, and researchers believe they could unlock some of the deepest secrets of how our brains grow and what happens when they go wrong.
“I don’t think that any of us set out to try an...

A field of scientific research is on the rise – one that makes powerful headline claims about how our life experiences can turn our genes on – and off – to shape the people we later become. The educational bandwagon is inevitable, writes Kat Arney, but do advocates of epigenetics have enough detailed evidence to persuade policymakers and pedagogues that this should be the next big schooling panacea?
It started, as so much in science seems to, with rats. Stressed-out baby rats, in this case: s...

Not enough people understand enough about science, and even fewer want to pursue a Stem-focused career. That’s a major problem for society, says Kat Arney, but she finds that the solution may lie in boosting young people’s ‘science capital’. And schools are key
Jenna is a bright kid. She’s full of questions and curiosity, and fascinated by fireworks. She dreams of building a rocket – if not to take her to the moon, then maybe to give her a lift over the garden fence. But Jenna won’t ever be a...

Going to visit his 91-year-old grandfather Bill in hospital, Chris Rossiter was expecting to share a few jokes with the energetic man he describes as a 'big, friendly giant'.
After all, Bill had only been admitted following a fall and the family thought he'd soon be on the mend.
Yet once Chris got there, the man he saw in the hospital bed was unrecognisable.
'He looked so terrible — more like Gollum in The Hobbit,' says Chris, 35, the director of a youth literacy charity.
'I could see his mou...

This article was taken from the March 2016 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Angelina Jolie Pitt has probably done more to raise the public profile of genetics than any other person. Her announcement that she carries an abnormal version of the BRCA1 gene responsible for the cancer that killed her mother, followed by surgery to remove her breasts and ovar...

By Kat Arney
DID you hear the one about how the giraffe got its neck? Aeons ago there was an animal that walked along a dusty path to a watering hole every morning. Halfway, she would spot a patch of trees with the tastiest, most succulent leaves on the savannah. Stretch as she might, she couldn’t quite reach them. Then one day the stretching paid off, and she suddenly had a mouthful of juicy fronds. Years passed, and the giraffe had babies. Over the generations they became spindlier and spin...

In 1952 a mathematician published a set of equations that tried to explain the patterns we see in nature, from the dappled stripes adorning the back of a zebra to the whorled leaves on a plant stem, or even the complex tucking and folding that turns a ball of cells into an organism. His name was Alan Turing.
More famous for cracking the wartime Enigma code and his contributions to mathematics, computer science and artificial intelligence, it may come as a surprise that Turing harboured such a...

Could an effort to gather genetic data from its population of one billion people help India take the lead in advanced healthcare?
India is the land of inventors and industry, spices and spirituality - and 1.3 billion human genomes. But although the subcontinent contributes around 20% of the world's population, the DNA sequences of its people make up around 0.2% of global genetic databases.
In a similar vein, 81% of the world's genomic information has been collected from people with European a...

Writing press releases about research for the Centre for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona