Private Passions

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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

Private Passions Podcast

Discussion & Talk

Music: Classical

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates, and talk about the influence music has had on their lives

Private Passions: Kat Arney

Kat Arney

BBC Radio 3 - Private Passions, Kat Arney

Michael Berkeley’s guest is science writer and broadcaster Dr Kat Arney.

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.

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 harp, which she has played since she was a teenager both as a classical instrument and in bands. She chooses music by the harpist Ruth Wall; Arnold Bax’s Harp Quintet; and we hear Kat herself playing with the Ethiopian musician Mulatu Astatke and the Heliocentrics.

And she lets Michael into the secret of how to fit a harp into the back of an Austin Metro.

Producer: Jane Greenwood
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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