Margaret Bastock

Early life and education

Margaret Bastock Manning was born on 22 March 1920 in Warwick, Warwickshire, England. Sources identify her parents as Andrew John Bastock and Frances Louise Cooke. She came of age in a period when women in Britain were increasingly entering higher education, yet they still faced substantial barriers to scientific careers, especially in fields that required laboratory access, advanced research training, and formal professional recognition.

Available records indicate that Bastock began a degree in zoology at Oxford University before the outbreak of the Second World War interrupted her studies. During the war she worked for the BBC, then returned to Oxford after the conflict and completed her undergraduate education. She subsequently became a member of St Anne’s College, Oxford. These early years placed her within one of Britain’s most important intellectual centers for zoology and comparative psychology, where she encountered emerging methods for studying animal behaviour experimentally rather than only descriptively.

Her education coincided with major changes in the biological sciences. Genetics was moving from abstract inheritance studies toward a deeper understanding of gene function, while ethology was developing as a discipline that sought to explain behavior through observation, comparison, and experimentation. Bastock’s later career would sit precisely at the intersection of these trends.

Career beginnings at Oxford

At Oxford, Bastock became involved in studies of motivational drives in animal behaviour and worked with Desmond Morris. In 1950 she began working toward her D.Phil. in the laboratory of Nikolaas Tinbergen, one of the founders of modern ethology. Tinbergen’s laboratory provided a highly influential environment in which animal behaviour was studied with rigorous experimental methods. Bastock’s research interests developed around the relationship between behaviour, genetics, and evolution, using Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism.

Her choice of subject was consequential. Fruit flies were already central to genetics, but behavior had not yet been convincingly integrated into genetic analysis in the way Bastock would help accomplish. Working in Tinbergen’s orbit also connected her to debates in mid-century biology about instinct, development, adaptation, and the biological basis of social behaviour. These were not merely technical questions; they were central to how biologists understood life itself.

As a woman pursuing advanced research in the first half of the twentieth century, Bastock worked in a scientific world where women were still underrepresented in senior academic posts. Her progress from student to researcher to college member at Oxford reflects both personal achievement and the gradual opening of institutional pathways for women in science.

The 1956 breakthrough on genes and behaviour

Bastock’s most famous contribution came in 1956, when she published research on the yellow mutation in Drosophila. The study demonstrated that a single gene, or a closely linked gene, could alter courtship behaviour in the fly. This was a landmark result because it offered the first clear evidence that genetic variation could shape behaviour in a direct and experimentally observable way.

Before this work, many scientists treated behaviour as too complex or too fluid to be meaningfully connected to individual genes. Bastock’s findings challenged that assumption. By showing that a mutation known for affecting pigmentation could also influence mating behaviour, she revealed that genes could have broader developmental and behavioral consequences than previously appreciated. The result helped create the intellectual foundation for what later became known as behavioural genetics.

The study was also important for ethology. Courtship behaviour, which had been studied through observation in natural settings, could now be approached through controlled genetic and experimental methods. Bastock’s work therefore helped bridge two scientific traditions: the descriptive study of animal behaviour and the experimental analysis of heredity. Her results were widely cited because they made the case that genes could influence complex biological patterning, not only anatomy or physiology.

In the context of the 1950s, this was a particularly bold and consequential achievement. The modern understanding of DNA was still relatively new, and biologists were still working out how genes affected development, morphology, and behavior. Bastock’s paper helped legitimize a more integrated view of organismal biology and remains a foundational reference point in the history of women’s scientific achievement.

Later research, writing, and academic life

After completing her D.Phil., Bastock continued to work on courtship behaviour and wrote a textbook on the subject, Courtship: A Zoological Study, published in 1967. That book extended her earlier experimental work into a broader synthesis of animal mating systems and behaviour. Her writing helped make the field more accessible to students and researchers while consolidating her reputation as a serious scholar of ethology.

Bastock’s research interests did not remain limited to fruit flies. Sources indicate that she continued to work in science and later studied child development and aggressive behaviour. This broader range suggests a sustained concern with how biological mechanisms shape behavior across species and developmental stages. Her work reflected the mid-century expansion of behavioral science into questions that linked genetics, development, and environment.

She collaborated with another student of Tinbergen, Aubrey Manning, whom she married in 1959. The couple later moved to Edinburgh in the 1960s and had two sons. While the public record is more detailed about Bastock’s scientific output than her private life, her marriage and family life situate her within a generation of women scientists who balanced research with domestic responsibilities in a period before institutional supports for dual-career academic families were common.

Recognition and historical significance

Bastock does not appear to have accumulated a large list of formal public honors, major prizes, or legislative firsts in the surviving sources consulted here. Her importance lies instead in the enduring historical significance of her research. She is remembered primarily for establishing a key link between genes and behaviour, a connection that later became central to behavioral genetics, neurobiology, and the study of animal communication and courtship.

Her work was especially influential because it came from a woman scientist working in a field where women were still fighting for equal recognition. In that respect, Bastock belongs to the broader story of women who helped transform the life sciences not only by making discoveries, but by demonstrating that women could contribute at the highest level of experimental research. Her career also shows how major scientific advances often emerge from close observation of model organisms combined with carefully framed hypotheses about heredity and evolution.

Her 1956 paper became a sentinel achievement because it changed the questions other researchers were willing to ask. Instead of treating behaviour as outside the reach of genetics, scientists increasingly examined how genes, development, and environment interact. That intellectual shift helped shape later work on courtship displays, mating systems, developmental genetics, and the biology of behaviour more generally.

Personal life

Margaret Bastock married Aubrey Manning in 1959. The couple had two sons. Beyond these details, surviving accessible sources provide limited information about her private life. That relative scarcity is common for women scientists of her generation, whose careers were often documented primarily through their publications rather than through fuller biographical profiles.

What is clear is that Bastock maintained an active scientific identity over several decades. Her life combined Oxford-based scholarship, experimental zoology, family life, and later work in related areas of behavioural research. Her marriage to another scientist also reflects the collaborative intellectual culture of mid-century British biology, in which research networks often extended through universities, laboratories, and personal relationships.

Later life and death

Margaret Bastock died of cancer on 10 June 1982 in Charminster, Dorset, at the age of 62. Her death ended a career that had helped shape a crucial transformation in twentieth-century biology. By demonstrating that a single gene could affect animal behaviour, she helped move the study of behaviour into a more explicitly biological and genetic framework.

Her legacy continues to matter because modern science now routinely investigates how genes influence neural development, behavior, and social interaction. Bastock’s work did not answer every question in those fields, but it helped make those questions scientifically legitimate. For that reason, she occupies an important place in the history of women in science, in behavioral genetics, and in the broader intellectual history of ethology.

In retrospect, her achievement stands as a reminder that a single carefully designed experiment can alter the direction of a discipline. Bastock’s 1956 research did exactly that, and her name remains associated with one of the earliest and most consequential demonstrations that behavior can have a genetic dimension.