Philip Ball is a freelance writer and broadcaster, and worked previously for over 20 years as an editor for Nature. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media, and has authored many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and the wider culture, including H2O: A Biography of Water, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford, and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. His latest book is How To Build a Human (2019).