Anne Warner 1940-2012

Anne Warner, who has died aged 71, Although she maintained her interest in combined careers as cell physiologist, a development, there can be little doubt that science policy maker and, latterly, an initiator much of her subsequent energy went into and Director of CoMPLEX, a centre for committee work and scientific policy. Sitting systems biology at University College London on councils including NERC, the Lister (UCL). Born Anne Brooks, she took a degree Institute and the Roslin Institute, she was in at UCL and then worked for her clearly much in demand; many can remember

Picture credit: Giorgio Gabella credit:Picture Giorgio PhD with Otto Hutter at the National Institute the speed with which she could deal with any for Medical Research, Mill Hill. There she was application. As a Vice President of the Council appointed at the age of 23 to a staff position of the Marine Biology Association at and carried out some of the classic studies on Plymouth she undoubtedly steered the MBA the pH dependence of the chloride through particularly difficult financial times in conductance in skeletal muscle. the 1990s. She had a major influence in the creation of the Cell Physiology workshop in Her main research was devoted to 1984 (originally known as the Microelectrode Professor Anne Warner understanding the role of gap junctions for Techniques workshop), a course that has intercellular communication during vertebrate created many cohorts of cell physiologists in embryonic development. Her collaborators the UK and abroad. included some of the major developmental biologists of the ‘70s and ‘80s. With her Anne had a penchant for academic gossip, students and colleagues Christine Slack, whisky and cigarettes, probably in that order. Susanna Blackshaw, Luca Turin and Sarah She very much saw herself as part of a UCL Guthrie, her laboratory published a series of family and was extremely loyal to it and to her papers in The Journal of Physiology, Nature friends. She had the uncanny ability to home and Cell which mapped out the early electrical in on conversations, preferably in proximity to events occurring during normal embryo a bottle of wine. She could usually be spotted development. She also co-authored with in the UCL quad pacing up and down deep in Peter Baker, Roger Tsien and Tim Rink papers thought with a cigarette held jauntily in one on many of the earliest projects which made hand. She was formidable in her the critical link between calcium and cell determination and, once her gaze fixed on organisation. you through her carriage-lamp spectacles, it was quite hard to refuse to do what she Following appointments at the Middlesex asked. Mobility became difficult for her during Hospital, in Lewis Wolpert’s biology her last years, but this did not stop her firing department, and then at the Royal Free off emails of advice and requests for Hospital School of Medicine when it was still information, often on an hourly basis. Her in Hunter Street in Bloomsbury, Anne took up husband, Michael, a marine engineer whom an appointment at UCL in 1976 in Geoff she met as a student, when both were in the Burnstock’s Department of Anatomy and UCL Dramatic Society, predeceased her by Developmental Biology where, in 1986, she just a few months. became Professor of Developmental Biology. That same year she was awarded the Royal Society Foulerton Professorship.

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