During her early rotations as a medical student in 1973, Gillian Butler-Browne met children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy who were incurable. She was so drawn to the field of muscle research that Butler-Browne never completed her medical degree, instead going on to do a traveling PhD that took her from London to the United States, Germany, and ultimately France, where she had the opportunity to study muscle at the Pasteur Institute. Not many people were working on muscle, Butler-Browne says: “There was a niche that nobody was filling in France.”
Currently the director of the Research Center at the Institute of Myology in Paris, Butler-Browne will be stepping down at the end of the year to go back to research. She’s interested in aging muscle and its regeneration, and how exercise can help—she walks at least 10 kilometers a day. At the end of a long day, Butler-Browne likes to ...
