Helen Mary Warnock was born on 14 April 1924 in Winchester, England. A philosopher, she chaired an inquiry that formed the basis of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. Elected Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford in 1949, she was appointed Headmistress of Oxford High School in 1966. In 1972, she joined the Independent Broadcasting Authority and became Talbot Research Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall. In 1976, she returned to St Hugh’s as Senior Research Fellow and served as Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge from 1984 to 1991.
Made Dame in 1984, she became Baroness Warnock the following year. Fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of Medical Sciences, she was awarded honorary degrees from Bath and Oxford. The only female panellist on the BBC Third Programme on philosophy in the 1950s, she was featured in the BBC Sound Archives in 2014. Notable works include Ethics Since 1900 (1960), The Philosophy of Sartre (1965), Existentialism (1970), What Must We Teach? (1977), An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Ethics (1998), and Mary Warnock: A Memoir: People and Places (2000).
