SCIENCE FESTIVAL FRINGE: Kate Arney: 'The future of cancer: where have.........

Speaker - Kate Arney

Title of talk - 'The future of cancer: where have we come from and where are we going?'

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Cancer has always been with us, affecting our earliest ancestors and even the dinosaurs before them. Yet it’s nly in the past hundred years that we’ve made any significant steps forward in understanding this complex group of diseases. And, arguably, it’s only in the past couple of decades that we’ve made any real progress in beating it.

Since the late 70s, the genetic revolution has completely changed the way we think about cancer, and how we approach diagnosing, treating and even preventing it. Advances in technology have made it possible to read the genetic code of tumours from thousands of patients, but how is all this information going to benefit patients? And

what else can we do to prevent lives being cut short by cancer?

Dr Kat Arney, Science Information Manager at Cancer Research UK, takes a look at the history of cancer research and discusses where we might be heading in the future.

Kat is a media spokesperson for the charity and writes for their award-winning Science Update blog, as well as working as a freelance science writer and broadcaster for the BBC, the Naked Scientists and more. She also acted as production consultant for the recent documentary “The Enemy Within – 50 Years of Fighting Cancer”, presented by Vivienne Parry. [ http://vimeo.com/54898062 ]

More information:

Naked Scientists episode‘When good Cells Go Bad’ (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/podcasts/genetics/show/20121214/) Naked Scientists episode ‘Cutting Edge Cancer Research (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/podcasts/show/20121104/)‘ www.edinburghskeptics.co.uk