The beauty of tasseled corn and the golden glow of the sun
is the perfect backdrop for the life of Dr. Barbara McClintock
You see she gained worldwide recognition and fame, in the scientific community,
for discoveries about the genetic qualities of corn or maize, as it's formerly known.
The very essence of Barbara McClintock's life is embodied in the words brilliant and tenacious.
She was pretty outgoing that she in the sense that she liked to talk with people but she also was a
person who needed a lot of solitude and she spent a lot of time by herself and needed that. Born
Eleanor McClintock, in 1902, she soon became known to family and friends as Barbara. After graduation
from Erasmus Hall high school in Brooklyn New York, McClintock earned her undergraduate,
master's and doctoral degrees in botany at Cornell University where she stayed on as an instructor
and researcher in maize genetics. McClintock's focus, throughout her days at Cornell, was on the
cytogenetics of maize, that is bringing together classic genetics and the study of maize cells.
Then, in 1936, influential maize geneticist, Lewis Stadler, offered McClintock a position
as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri. She accepted and Stadler introduced her
to the use of x-rays as a tool for studying genetics. McClintock's description of the
Breakage Fusion Bridge Cycle, in 1938, reaffirmed her status as one of the great
figures of maize cytogenetics and propelled her to deeper research into the chromosome.
But by 1940 she became convinced she would not gain tenure at Missouri so she left.
In December 1941 she accepted a one-year research position at the Carnegie Institution
of Washington's Department of Genetics at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island New York.
The job turned into a full-time staff position and in the late 40s she discovered some extraordinary
genes that she called "controlling elements". McClintock also found that those controlling
elements were transposable in other words could move and change position on the chromosome.
Her theory was that those movable genes, which she called elements, regulated other genes
by selectively stimulating or inhibiting their actions. She believed those controlling elements
were the answer to the decades-old problem of how complex organisms could develop
many different kinds of cells and tissues when each cell in the organism
had the same set of genes. But by 1951, when her theories became widely circulated,
their acceptance within the scientific community was less than unanimous.
Although McClintock's work was never really forgotten it came back into prominence in the
1960s when the theory of genetic regulation, put forth by a pair of french geneticists,
bore formal similarities to her theories of genetic control.
But in the context of the 60s her discovery of genetic transposition seemed much more important
In 1971, President Nixon awarded Barbara McClintock
the National Medal of Science and recognition of her work began to mount.
In 78, Dr. McClintock was given the Rosenstiel Award for basic medical research from Brandeis
University and in 1983 she received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine,
the first woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in that category. The Nobel Prize for McClintock
was bittersweet. She was glad to have the recognition of her colleagues, there's no question
that she felt she had not gotten the recognition for her late work that she deserved, but
she always thought that the Nobel Prize recognized the wrong achievements. The Nobel Prize was given
to her for her discovery of transposable genetic elements. What she most wanted to be acknowledged
for was the discovery of genetic regulation, gene's ability to turn other genes on and off.
Dr. McClintock remained affiliated with the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory until her death in 1992.