Anne Warner

Anne E. Warner (25 August 1940 – 16 May 2012) was a British biologist and a professor in the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at University College London. Her major field of research was morphogenesis. Warner was known for her work and leadership in a variety of research projects and organisations. She is perhaps most well known for her roles as a cell electrophysiologist, politician of science, and founder of the organisation UCL centre CoMPLEX. Education Born Anne Elizabeth Brookes on 25 August 1940 at Golders Green, she was the only child of Elizabeth (née Marshall) and James Frederick Crompton Brooks (1914–1996), an engineer in the Ministry of Aircraft Production. She was educated at Pate's Grammar School for Girls in Cheltenham, going on to study at University College London where she graduated with a BSc in physiology. She studied for her PhD at the National Institute for Medical Research under the supervision of Otto Hutter, receiving her doctorate in 1964 at the age of 23. That same year she took up a staff position at the Institute and began research into the effect of pH on skeletal muscle chloride conductance. Research Warner was a participant and leader in a wide variety of research projects, and is best known for her work into the role of gap junctions in embryological development, which she began to pursue during the late 1970s following her research at the National Institute for Medical Research. For the last 20 years before Warner began her research on gap junctions, embryologists had been working hard to prove that gap junctions were the means through which cells communicated and associated into tissues during embryological development. Warner, along with her colleague Sarah Guthrie, was said to have ended this journey with her discovery and conclusions. While working with the embryos of frogs, Warner observed "electrical coupling" between adjacent cells, meaning that an induced change in the resting voltage of one cell resulted in a corresponding change in an adjacent cell, which demonstrated the fact that junctions between the cells are responsible for transporting ions from one location to the next. However, Warner noticed that the gap junctions appeared to be present during some developmental stages, but not others. To prove the essential role of these gap junctions in embryological development, Warner conducted experiments during the 1980s to block these junctions and observe the resulting effects.