During decades of study on maize plants, American geneticist and botanist Barbara McClintock (1902–1992) was able to discover many of the basic properties of genes and heredity. For her trailblazing work, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983.
In her work, McClintock contributed to one of the greatest scientific revolutions of the twentieth century. When she first started studying genetics as an undergraduate at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1919, it was a poorly understood field. By the time she died, however, work had begun on the Human Genome Project to decode the genetic makeup of the entire human body.
McClintock was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and enrolled at Cornell in 1919 against the wishes of her mother, who felt a college education was inappropriate for a girl. As McClintock later described, only one genetics class at Cornell was open to undergraduates, but a professor spotted her potential and allowed her to enroll in a more advanced seminar in the field. She obtained her doctorate in 1927.
McClintock’s most famous achievement—the one she won the Nobel Prize for—was her discovery of genetic transposition in the late 1940s. By studying corn plants, McClintock had realized that traits were not always passed down in a completely predictable, Mendelian fashion. She theorized that strands of genetic material—later identified as DNA—move around within cells, producing different color patterns and other traits in the corn.
Although initially rejected by most geneticists, her findings came to be accepted by the late 1960s. She was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1970, a prelude to her Nobel Prize the next decade.
In the male-dominated profession of genetics, McClintock also compiled a list of milestones: She was the first woman president of the Genetics Society, among the first women to win a MacArthur grant (in 1981), and only the third woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She died on Long Island at age ninety.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- According to her obituary in the New York Times, McClintock did not own a telephone until 1986, preferring instead that her friends and associates contact her by mail. Appropriately, she was featured on a US Postal Service commemorative stamp in 2005.
- McClintock attended Erasmus High School in Brooklyn, the same school as future Three Stooges leader Moe Howard (1897–1975).
- When she won the Nobel Prize in 1983, McClintock was the first American woman and only the third woman ever to win an unshared Nobel in any scientific category. Marie Curie (1867–1934) won the award in chemistry in 1911, and Dorothy C. Hodgkin (1910–1994) won in 1964, also for chemistry.
