The geneticist who uses science to free parents wrongly convicted of killing their children

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CAREER FEATURE
16 July 2024

The geneticist who uses science to free parents wrongly convicted of killing their children

Carola Vinuesa describes how her career changed after identifying a genetic mutation that helped to secure the freedom of Kathleen Folbigg, who was serving a 30-year jail term for killing her four children.

By Benjamin Plackett

Carola Vinuesa’s story lies at the intersection of an unusual Venn diagram: her expertise in genetics overlaps with an interest in feminism, social justice and the sway that science can hold in a court of law.

Vinuesa’s day job is an assistant research director at the Francis Crick Institute in London, where she leads a laboratory that unpicks the biology and genetics of autoimmune diseases. She and her team have shown that there is a connection between genetic variations and autoimmune diseases such as lupus. The findings help to explain the pathogenesis of this disease, which affects 3.41 million people worldwide and includes symptoms that range from joint pain to severe organ damage.

Vinuesa also moonlights as a sort of geneticist-turned-private-investigator, lending her scientific know how pro bono to parents who she thinks are wrongly accused of killing their children (see ‘Quick fire questions’). So far, she has been contacted about six cases, and done considerable work on four. Currently, only one case has resulted in a conviction being overturned, when her intervention helped to free Kathleen Folbigg who was in prison in Australia.

“I feel so overwhelmed by the cases, each of them takes a lot more than you want to give, but these women are desperate,” she says. “I’m a mother. This could happen to me and so I feel for these women.”

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