McClintock, Barbara

McClintock, Barbara (1902–1992), biologist and Nobel laureate.Born in Hartford, Barbara McClintock was educated at Cornell, from which she received a Ph.D. in botany in 1927. She taught at Cornell and the University of Missouri before joining the Department of Genetics at the Carnegie‐funded research center at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, in 1941, where she remained for the rest of her career.

McClintock's place in the history of biology is guaranteed by a lifelong career of pathbreaking research in genetics and cytology. The year of her birth coincided with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's work, and her coming of age with that of genetics. Her early work on maize at Cornell University in the 1920s and 1930s, combining microscopic studies of chromosome structure with the new science of genetics, provided crucial evidence for the chromosomal basis of genetic crossover. But it was her pioneering work on the transposition of genes in the 1940s and 1950s for which she is best known. This work, performed after she moved to Cold Spring Harbor, demonstrated that chromosomes are dynamic structures, but it went against the prevailing view of the time that the position of genes on the chromosome was fixed. As a result, her findings seemed incomprehensible to many scientists and went largely unheeded for years. In the 1970s, however, with the identification of “jumping genes” in the bacteria E. coli, McClintock's much earlier work with maize was recalled and granted new recognition. In 1983, she was awarded the Nobel Prize, thirty‐two years after her first definitive paper on the subject.

McClintock particularly interests historians of biology for her success in breaking with tradition on a number of fronts: as a geneticist whose understanding of genes was shaped by her interests in development, as a woman who refused to be constrained by conventional notions of gender, and as a scientist who dared to affirm the necessity of a “feeling for the organism” in the rational construction of knowledge.
See also Genetics and Genetic Engineering; Science: From 1914 to 1945; Science: Since 1945.

Bibliography

E.F. Keller , A Feeling for the Organism, 1983.
N. Federoff and and D. Botstein , The Dynamic Genome, 1992.

Evelyn Fox Keller