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Recently, F1000 Publisher Kathleen Wets visited Dame Kay Davies in Oxford soon after she won the WISE Lifetime Achievement Award. The award celebrated her outstanding career in science, which inspired other women to follow in her footsteps.

In Kathleen’s video, Dame Kay, an F1000 International Advisory Board Member, tells us about her almost 3 decades of work in Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a disease of muscle wastage. She was part of a team who, in the early 1980s, were the first people to identify the gene – dystrophin –that causes the disease. She hopes to produce an effective treatment for Duchenne’s, and in fact, has clinical trials in place testing a protein called utrophin in human Duchenne’s sufferers. She describes this as an “amazing time in genetics.”