Kat Arney
Bloomsbury Sigma, March 2016
Mendel had his peas, Darwin his finches. Geneticist Kat Arney (perhaps unsurprisingly) chooses cats as her biological muse. But the U.K.-based science writer doesn’t pick just any felines to illustrate science’s emerging understanding of gene regulation—she leans on the six-toed cats popularized by Ernest Hemingway, whose Florida estate still teems with the polydactyl felines. “Learning about Hemingway cats and their broken [genetic] switches got me thinking about my own understanding of how genes work,” Arney writes in the introduction to Herding Hemingway’s Cats.
The author explains that it’s not faulty DNA that leads to polydactyl cats or humans, but rather mistakes in the molecular machinery that ushers genes through the processes of expressing their proteins at the right times and places during development. What follows is an engaging journey through the science, both historical and cutting-edge, of the complexities of genetic functioning. Arney wants ...
