Although they grew up under the same roof, the Storey sisters might have well been living in two separate worlds. Kate, a developmental biologist and head of the Division of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of Dundee, spends most of her days in a lab working to unravel the mysteries of neural development. Helen, born just 16 months earlier, was drawn to the glamorous world of fashion, training under iconic couturiers such as Valentino before launching her own clothing label.
But that all that changed in 1996 when the Wellcome Trust put out an initiative looking to fund collaborations between artists and scientists. Drawn by the possibility of communicating her science to a broad audience, Kate sent her sister the leaflet with a post-it note bearing a single question mark.
Helen was intrigued. "By nature, I'm an experimentalist," Helen says. "But in the fashion industry, to experiment is to risk going bankrupt."
So the sisters rose to the challenge, producing a fashion collection with developmental biology right at its beating heart. Over the following six months, Kate gave Helen a crash course in embryonic development, having her peer through a microscope to observe a chicken embryo from its first cell division, to its first heartbeat, ...
