Margaret Hurlstone Hardy Fallding


Margaret Hurlstone Hardy Fallding was a developmental biologist in Australia and Canada who studied hair follicles.

Early life

Margaret "Peggy" Hurlstone Hardy was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1920 and grew up in Brisbane, Queensland. She was a third-generation scientist – the only child of Australian entomologist George Hudleston Hurlstone Hardy and granddaughter of British engineer and amateur entomologist George Hurlstone Hardy.
Peggy's father worked in the biology department of the University of Queensland, where he held a Walter and Eliza Hall Fellowship from 1922 to 1932. Peggy's mother, Martha Elizabeth Olive Harris, was a former Tasmanian schoolteacher.
Peggy attended Somerville House, where she was dux of the school in 1937, and then enrolled at the University of Queensland in 1938. She took her Bachelor of Science in zoology and received the gold medal for outstanding merit in 1942. She won the Duncan McNaughton Scholarship in 1940, and was awarded a Walter and Eliza Hall Fellowship in Economic Biology in 1943 after completing her MSc in zoology.
Hardy worked at the University of Sydney and at the CSIR McMaster Animal Health Laboratory during her fellowship, studying the heat tolerance, skin, and fibres of sheep. At McMaster, she met Helen Newton Turner, who became a scientific collaborator and lifelong friend.

Career

In 1945, Hardy was appointed assistant research officer at the CSIR after her mentor Harold Burnell Carter challenged arguments that women were "a poor investment." She went to the University of Cambridge in 1947 and studied at Newnham College, earning her zoology PhD in 1949 under the direction of cell biologist Dame Honor Fell. While still in her 20s, Hardy was the first person in the world to grow hair outside a living organism.
After returning to Australia, Hardy became vice principal of the Women's College at the University of Sydney and a member of the board of reference for the Evangelical Union's "Mission in the University" in 1951. It was in Sydney that Hardy got to know sociologist and poet Harold Fallding, who shared her intellectual approach to Christian evangelism. In 1954, future Anglican primate Rev. Marcus Loane officiated at Hardy's marriage to Fallding in the Moore College chapel as she became Margaret Hardy-Fallding. Soon after, Margaret "had to slow down on embryonic hair follicle culture because I was culturing an embryonic human." She gave birth to three children, all delivered by her friend Margaret Mulvey, dubbed the "mother of Australian obstetrics," before returning to a scientific career.
In the 1960s, the Falldings moved to North America, where Margaret worked at Columbia University in New York before joining the staff of Canada's Ontario Veterinary College in 1966 as its second female faculty member. There she taught embryology and histology in the University of Guelph's department of biomedical sciences. In both countries, anti-nepotism rules barred her from positions at universities where her husband worked and thus forced her to commute to other cities for more than 30 years. Margaret technically retired in 1985 as professor emeritus, with close to 100 publications on her curriculum vitae, but continued her lab work for another decade. In 1985-6, she was president of the Guelph chapter of Sigma Xi, the international scientific research society.
Margaret Hardy Fallding died in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, in 2004. She was survived by her husband, University of Waterloo professor emeritus Dr. Harold Joseph Fallding, three daughters and one granddaughter.

Legacy

Hardy's curiosity-driven research inspired a new generation of stem cell scientists to use hair follicles as "an accessible and intricately beautiful model system."

Selected published works