Professor Malcolm Burrows FRS 1943 – 2026

He worked on the properties of neurons and the circuits they form to understand how they control behaviour and continued his research long after he retired. 

He is remembered here by his former colleagues, William Foster, Emeritus Curator of Insects and Steve Rogers, Senior Research Associate, University of Oxford.

Malcolm as Head of Department 

By William Foster 

My first memorable encounter with Malcolm was at some point in 1995, not long after Gabriel Horn had retired. The Department was looking for a Big Beast as the next Professor of Zoology; time was passing, and a suitable Beast had not yet been lured into its stall. Malcolm and I were discussing who else might step up to the plate. Malcolm suddenly said, in a very quiet voice, “What about Yours truly?” “Who?” I replied. “Me” he said, “what about Little Malc?” I was stunned. No-one could possibly think Malcolm was little. And since when had anyone called him Malc? But, most importantly, why would any successful, intelligent, worldly-wise, research scientist, like Malcolm, even think of taking on the immense administrative burden of the 1866 Chair and Headship of Department. 

But Malcolm was in earnest, he brushed aside my incredulity, and in 1996 he was elected as the eighth holder of the 1866 Chair of Zoology and Head of the Department. Looking back, it now seems clear to me that this was one of the most consequential decisions in the entire 160 years of the Department’s existence. 

If you walk into the Zoology Department today, almost everything that seems familiar there, and which indeed we take for granted, is a legacy of Malcolm’s extraordinary leadership. 

It was largely due to his persistence and determination that two new permanently endowed chairs became established in the Department: 

• The Prince Philip Chair of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, funded by the University, in recognition of the Chancellor’s long service to the University. 
• The Miriam Rothschild Chair of Conservation Biology established by external donation. 

It was Malcolm’s relentless advocacy and vision at the side of Alison Richard, the Vice-Chancellor, which ensured that the Cambridge Conservation Initiative – the CCI: the world’s largest concentration of conservation expertise – snuggled down next to the Department and the Museum of Zoology, as the Beating Heart of the New Museums Site. And it was Malcolm who first put to David Attenborough the idea that he might lend his name to the building that bears his name. And indeed what better name could there be for a Beating Heart focussed on Zoology and Conservation Science? 

Malcolm secured the future of the Museum, at a time when many institutions worldwide were disposing of their collections, and it was Malcolm who ensured that its Director should hold a professorial appointment. 

He refreshed the Department’s attitude to teaching by establishing an independent Teaching Office with a Deputy Head of Department enjoying full-time administrative support; a complete refurbishment of the Elementary Laboratory, restoring it to its rightful position as the most-envied teaching lab in the entire school of Biological Sciences. 

He introduced the study of Conservation to the department, pivoting our research and teaching focus more onto areas of ecology, evolution, and conservation. 

He opened up the procedures for appointing academic staff so that - for the first time - members of the Department felt a legitimate sense of ownership of the decisions about those who were being appointed. 

Indeed, during his fourteen years as Head of department there was established a genuine feeling of academic and social prosperity within Zoology. 

This is, without question, an astonishing and enduring legacy. How was he able to do this? 

I think that at the bottom of it all was his genuine passion and excitement in the natural world, a child-like wonder in the animals themselves and a child-like determination to get to the bottom of how they worked. By taking them apart if necessary. 

This passion never dimmed. So that I would often seek him out about some minor teaching issue in his lair on the second floor, and find him, glued to his Wild Microscope. 

“Come at look at this astonishing fulgorid, William”; “look what it is doing with its hind femora” It would have been exceptionally unlikely to have caught any other Biological Head of Department in flagrante delicto in this manner. 

I think that he was determined that as many people as possible should be able to share this excitement and – if they wanted – also have the privilege that he had enjoyed of making new discoveries about the natural world. 

To make this happen required exceptional levels of commitment, energy, and self-discipline. The Scottish philosopher, Thomas Carlyle defined genius as, ‘the transcendent capacity of taking trouble.’  I think that this definition fits Malcolm very well – and in this sense he was, in my view, touched by genius. 

Malcolm always: 

• Took the trouble to read all the way through the papers before Faculty Board meetings: I suspect he was the only person at these meetings to have done that 
• He took the trouble to spend some time on the Part II North Norfolk Field Course; on one occasion you would have found him sprinkling parmesan on a muddy saltmarsh shore. This mattered, since few Heads of Department have any idea what is involved in running a field course 
• He took the trouble to visit members of the Department when they were in difficulty: for example when they were lying alone and exceptionally ill in Addenbrooke’s hospital 
• It was by taking trouble that Malcolm and Chris, the Ying and Yang Power Couple of Zoology, secured for the Department the Aola Richards Legacy, one of the largest legacies from an individual in the University’s history, which will support postgraduate students for years to come.  Aola had been identified as a “prospect” by the University’s Development Office. Malcolm quickly discovered his shared interest with Aola in insects, and this developed into mutual respect and friendship. It became clear to Malcolm and Chris that Aola was intensely lonely: a Kiwi, far, far from home, marooned in her Kensington apartment. In the end, they became her carers; dealing with her washing, her shopping, and – above all - spending time with her. Without the trouble that they took, over a sustained period, there would have been no legacy. 

When preparing to say something about him on the occasion of his retirement, I asked Sue Rolfe, the chief technician to give me some feedback on what the Assistant Staff thought of him. The response was very positive, but two comments stood out: “Green shoes” and “Mr Grumpy”. I was a bit unsure how he would respond when I revealed the second comment; but he smiled --- and I hope he is smiling now. 

The fact that people felt confident enough to reveal this was a compliment, a sign of their warmth and affection for him. That Malcolm was one of them; a local boy who had – by his own efforts - made it to the top; not someone who had been parachuted in from a higher zone, trailing clouds of social and academic entitlement. 

Malcolm achieved all of this modestly, without ever feeling the need to show off. Indeed, he is probably one of the least vain men I have ever known, developing a feeling of reticence to almost heroic levels. He once, very kindly, gave me – as I know he did to many others - a beautiful wooden object (a box in my case) of his own construction. It seemed somehow redolent of Malcolm himself: unshowy, unadorned, exquisitely functional and fit for purpose. He gave it to me very quietly, because although I think he was rather pleased with it, this feeling was entirely swamped by his determination not to give me the impression that he thought he was in some way the Grinling Gibbons of Girton. 

Working with Malcolm was always rewarding: mainly because he knew how to get things done. Even so, each meeting with him usually began with a short warm-up. With me this would involve some new discovery of his about the jumping mechanism of an insect I had not always heard of. With Julian Jacobs – his departmental administrator – it would focus on the football clubs they supported (Arsenal and Chelsea): we can see them now, the Statler & Waldorf of Zoology, two Mr Grumpys, trying to outdo each other in the denigration of the competence of the managers of their respective football clubs. 

Malcolm was not a Big Beast but – something far more useful – a Great Leader: someone with both the patience to master the detail and the vision to drive the department into the future. Loyal, wise, and fair: Malcolm was precisely what the Department needed at the time. Let us continue to celebrate his legacy and hold his memory warmly in our hearts. 

Malcolm Burrows had an extraordinarily long-lasting, influential and productive career driven by a love of research and a need to understand the mechanisms underlying behaviour. 

Malcolm’s very first paper, on the motor control of the eye-stalks of crabs, was in Nature (1). Another early paper from 1969 on the extremely rapid and forceful strike of mantis shrimps (2) fully showcased Malcolm’s strengths and interests. This paper combined meticulous anatomy, electrophysiological recordings and detailed behavioural and biomechanical analyses. These became the running themes of Malcolm’s research. Using the locust, Malcolm increasingly came to focus on the question of how does information flow through the nervous system in order to produce even the simplest movements? This typically required the simultaneous placing of tiny glass electrodes into several small nerve cells in communication with each other. Many of Malcolm’s experiments required a technical skill, borne of persistence and practice, that few possess. His work in this period was foundational in understanding how neural circuits work. A particular achievement was the characterization of non-spiking neurons (3), which have a critical role in contextualising the flow of information in the nervous system. This period culminated in the writing of his book – ‘The Neurobiology of an Insect Brain’ (4) published in 1996, which remains extensively cited. 

A peculiar feature of locusts is their ability to transform from a harmless solitary form to a swarming menace, which profoundly affects their nervous systems. Considerable progress was made unravelling the causes (5) and some of the consequences (6) of this remarkable change in locusts’ lifestyles. 

The increasing availability of high-speed video cameras also allowed Malcolm to renew his interest in the mechanical and neural challenges posed by very fast movements. A chance observation on a University field trip, led Malcolm to discover that the humble frog-hopper, an insect that is found everywhere and whose young produce the frothy cuckoo-spit that you can see festooning plants in late spring, jumps with record-breaking speed (7). They far outperform insects such as fleas while experiencing accelerations about 200 times greater than gravity. One short letter to Nature later, this marked the beginning of another chapter of Malcolm’s research. Carrying on well into his retirement Malcolm produced an extensive corpus of papers analysing the biomechanics of jumping across many groups of insects. Field trips to Australia, South Africa and India considerably broadened his range of subjects. 

Malcolm settled a long-running and sometimes acrimonious dispute about how fleas jump, by showing definitively that they take off from their feet rather than from their knees (8), which led to a tv documentary with David Attenborough. More widespread press coverage followed Malcolm’s discovery that some bugs coordinate the movements of their hind legs during jumping through the use of interlocking mechanical gears (9). The highly elastic protein resilin was another abiding interest as it is found in almost all body parts involved in jumping. He showed that rather than acting like a spring, resilin protects insects’ bodies from breaking under the extreme forces produced by jumping (10). 

Between 1967 and 2025, a span of 58 years, Malcolm produced on average of one paper every 3 months. This is even more remarkable when you consider that Malcolm rarely put his name to papers that he hadn’t contributed to experimentally. Malcolm had little time for airy abstractions, the belief that authority automatically grants the right to be listened to, or attempts to obfuscate with jargon: the centrality of the experiment ran throughout his entire career and he firmly believed that the data should speak for themselves without overbearing authorial coercion. Malcolm remained driven to discover new things right up until the end of his life. 

Chris accompanied Malcolm hunting jumping cockroaches in the South African veldt; locating jumping bugs, originally identified by Darwin, in the blue mountains of Australia; chasing Ghost crabs on a Hawaiian beach, or more prosaically dealing with the aftermath of insect collecting trips in the Cambridgeshire countryside. 

Malcolm Burrows spent his life making extraordinary discoveries but as he said at his 80th Birthday celebration: ‘it’s been fun’.

Notes

1. M Burrows (1967) Reflex Withdrawal of the Eyecup in the Crab Carcinus. Nature 215 (5096), 56-57. 

2. M Burrows (1969) The mechanics and neural control of the prey capture strike in the mantid shrimps Squilla and Hemisquilla. Zeitschrift für vergleichende Physiologie 62 (4), 361-381. 

3. M Burrows, MVS Siegler (1976) Transmission without spikes between locust interneurones and motoneurones. Nature 262 (5565), 222-224. 

4. M Burrows (1996) The neurobiology of an insect brain. Oxford University Press. 

5. ML Anstey, SM Rogers, SR Ott, M Burrows, SJ Simpson (2009) Serotonin mediates behavioral gregarization underlying swarm formation in desert locusts. Science 323 (5914), 627-630. 

6. SM Rogers, HG Krapp, M Burrows, T Matheson (2007) Compensatory plasticity at an identified synapse tunes a visuomotor pathway. Journal of Neuroscience 27 (17), 4621-4633. 

7. M Burrows (2003) Froghopper insects leap to new heights. Nature 424 (6948), 509-509. 

8. GP Sutton, M Burrows (2011) Biomechanics of jumping in the flea. Journal of Experimental Biology 214 (5), 836-847. 

9. M Burrows, G Sutton (2013).Interacting gears synchronize propulsive leg movements in a jumping insect. Science 341 (6151), 1254-1256. 

10. SM Rogers, DA Cullen, D Labonte, GP Sutton, JJM Vanden Broeck, M Burrows (2025) RNAi of the elastomeric protein resilin reduces jump velocity and resilience to damage in locusts. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122 (1), e2415625121