My Friend Anne
On Wednesday my friend Anne - Anne Warner FRS, Emeritus Professor of Developmental Biology at UCL - died. I will miss her.
I had been scheduled to visit Anne on Monday, in her flat close to UCL, but we shifted the appointment to Wednesday. Early on Wednesday I received a call from another friend of Anne's to say that she had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and was in the critical care unit of UCLH, so that evening I visited her there. She was unconscious, connected by tubes and wires to numerous machines and screens. I sat by her bed for a while, but did not know what to say or do. I thought of holding her hand, a gesture of reassurance, for her or for me, I am not sure, but it seemed wrong. Anne unconscious, Anne at peace, not Anne really.
Anne and I worked together during the last stages of her career as part of an interdisciplinary team she had assembled to work on systems biology. I had not really intended to get involved, I attended a meeting with a view to "facilitating the computing engagement with the life sciences". Anne was having none of it. She asked hard questions, she demanded answers, she wanted total intellectual commitment. When I failed to attend a further meeting she phoned and, dissatisfied with my evasiveness, walked across campus to drag me out of my office. I was not the only one, Anne's conscripts came from across the institution, brought together by her force of character and insistence on the importance of the questions we had to answer.
Anne was a lab scientist. She would sit in her very messy office at the back of a basement lab, wedged between the papers in piles covered in what I would guess was a light dusting of cigarette ash and the shrouded microscope. This was where she was truly at home. Despite her commitment to her lab however, she was sure that mathematics and computing were becoming fundamental to her discipline. She asked difficult questions and was not easily satisfied with the answers. We spent hours discussing differences in approaches to modelling, she insisted on understanding the tools I used and she equally insisted that I understood and respected the biological details that were important to her. Anne cared about her science and remained passionate about it. She had a wide ranging curiosity and I remember her in the early stages of revovery from the effects of a serious stroke, in a rather tired rehabilitation room at 'the National' in Queens Square, discussing neurology and the absence of science in her treatment.
She belonged to a generation of women scientists who had to make sacrifices for their careers. Like many of her generation she could be characterised as 'formidable' because she would not be ignored. Throughout her career Anne expected to be treated as an equal and worked to achieve it. She never tried to be a role model, she was not that self-conscious, but she was, nevertheless.
Anne loved academic gossip, particularly over white wine or G&T in the Senior Common Room but she was never unkind, if somebody did good work that was enough to gain her respect. She was instinctively loyal to UCL and her Department. UCL was her family and she was part of the place. An awkward, committed, engaged academic. We collectively will miss her, and yes, I will miss her.