American Botanist 1909-

Harriet Baldwin Creighton is a geneticist who helped prove that genes are located on chromosomes. She was born in Delevan, Illinois, on June 27, 1909. She attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts and received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1929. That year she matriculated at Cornell University as a botany graduate student and a laboratory assistant in botany. At that time Barbara McClintock, who later became a top American plant geneticist and Nobel Prize winner in medicine in 1983, was an instructor at Cornell. The two women immediately became friends and began working together on an important genetic problem: since the beginning of the twentieth century, cytologists theorized that chromosomes carried and exchanged genetic information to produce new combinations of physical traits, but cytological evidence to prove their hypothesis was lacking.

McClintock had bred a special strain of corn (Zea mays) with a ninth chromosome that produced...