Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock (1902–1992) was born in Hartford, Connecticut on June 16, and earned a doctorate in botany at Cornell University in 1927. Her early work on maize cytogenetics in R. A. Emerson's group at Cornell University in the 1920s and 1930s (where she worked with Marcus Rhoades, George Beadle, Harriet Creighton, Charles Burnham, and others) provided crucial evidence for the chromosomal basis of genetic crossover. Later, McClintock moved to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York where she continued her groundbreaking research in genetics. But of her many achievements, her work on genetic transposition stands out as the most revolutionary. This work, establishing the mobility of genetic elements, defied conventional assumptions of the fixity of genes on the chromosomes and went unheeded for many years by most geneticists. But in 1983, thirty-two years after her first definitive paper on the subject, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine, and her vindication was complete. After a lifetime pattern of relative obscurity and isolation, this prize ushered in a period of widespread public recognition—recognition not only for the quality of her work, but also for the model of scientific research she both advocated and exemplified. In her own words, good scientific research needed to be premised on "a feeling for the organism." She died near Cold Spring Harbor on September 2.
McClintock is of particular interest to 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; as a scientist who dared to affirm the importance of cultivating an intimate relation to the object of one's study in the rational construction of knowledge. For her, understanding a plant requires following it from its beginning: "I don't feel I really know the story if I don't watch the plant all the way along. So I know every plant in the field. I know them intimately, and I find it a great pleasure to know them" (Keller 1983, p. 198). But McClintock has also become a controversial figure, largely owing to differences in perspective between the two biographies that have been published (Keller 1983, Comfort 2001). Controversy centers largely on two issues: first, the extent to which her early work on transposition was in fact neglected; and second, on whether or not her particular methodologicalstyle can be taken as representative of either a "feminine" or a "feminist" approach to science.
Barbara McClintock, 1902–1992. American geneticist McClintock received the Nobel Prize in Physiology for her discovery that genes could move from place to place on a chromosome. (AP/Wide World Photos.)
Perceptions of neglect and recognition are inevitably at least partly subjective. Certainly, McClintock felt her work to be neglected, or at best, misunderstood. Equally certainly, many colleagues held her in enormously high regard. Nevertheless, prior to her Nobel Prize, and even after the rediscovery of transposition in the mid-1970s (under the name "jumping genes"), the phenomenon was widely regarded as of marginal significance to the general processes of genetics and development. Furthermore, interviews conducted prior to 1983 provide strong support for a fairly widespread tendency, perhaps especially among molecular biologists, to regard her and her work as eccentric curiosities. After 1983, however, a sea change could be seen to take place.
As a Nobel Laureate, McClintock suddenly became a heroine with whom virtually everyone wished to be identified, including feminists and mainstream scientists. Indeed, it was only at this point that McClintock began to be perceived as a feminist heroine, and that Keller's book (published some months before the prize) began to be read as a feminist manifest. Both readings fly in the face of the evidence—evidence provided both by McClintock's life and by Keller's biography. Comfort's biography goes some way toward correcting the record, and in deflating the "McClintock myth." Unfortunately, in the process he may have unwittingly contributed to the creation of a new myth, making of McClintock too much a practitioner of "normal science," and one who now appears to have been more fully embraced by the community around her than the historical record suggests. However, the scientific community's celebration of McClintock after 1983 is evident, and attested to by numerous publications (such as, for example, the excellent overview of her work by Federoff and Botstein 1992).
Comfort, Nathaniel. (2001). The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock's Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Federoff, Nina V., and David Botstein, eds. (1992). The Dynamic Genome: Barbara McClintock's Ideas in the Century of Genetics. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.
Keller, Evelyn Fox. (1983). A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. New York: W. H. Freeman.
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