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McClintock earned her B.S. and M.S. degrees in botany at Cornell University, and received her Ph.D. in the same subject at Cornell in 1927. Although women were not permitted to major in genetics at Cornell, she became a highly influential member of a small group who studied maize (corn) cytogenetics, the genetic study of maize at the cellular ...
Mar 21, 2016 · By 1927 McClintock had blown through her graduate coursework and earned her PhD in cytology, genetics, and zoology, becoming, according to several New York newspapers, “one of the youngest ever to receive the honor” at the age of twenty-four.
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Sep 8, 2023 · In 1983, McClintock became the first woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1986 and the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame in 2008. McClintock died in Huntington, New York, in 1992 at the age of 90.
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In 1941 McClintock moved to Long Island, New York, to work at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where she spent the rest of her professional life. In the 1940s, by observing and experimenting with variations in the coloration of kernels of corn, she discovered that genetic information is not stationary. By tracing pigmentation changes in corn and using a microscope to examine that plant’s large chromosomes, she isolated two genes that she called “controlling elements.” These genes controlled the genes that were actually responsible for pigmentation. McClintock found that the controlling elements could move along the chromosome to a different site, and that these changes affected the behaviour of neighbouring genes. She suggested that these transposable elements were responsible for new mutations in pigmentation or other characteristics.
McClintock’s work was ahead of its time and was for many years considered too radical—or was simply ignored—by her fellow scientists. Deeply disappointed with her colleagues, she stopped publishing the results of her work and ceased giving lectures, though she continued doing research. Not until the late 1960s and ’70s, after biologists had determined that the genetic material was DNA, did members of the scientific community begin to verify her early findings. When recognition finally came, McClintock was inundated with awards and honours, most notably the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. She was the first woman to be the sole winner of this award.
Written by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Top Image Credit: ©American Philosophical Society Library—Barbara McClintock Papers/National Library of Medicine
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•Maria Mitchell
Aug 10, 2016 · Barbara McClintock revolutionized the field of plant genetics, receiving the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1983 for discovering “mobile genetic elements”.
Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine in 1983. Main achievements: Work in genetic structure of maize. Discovery of genetic transposition. Barbara McClintock was an American scientist and one of the world's most distinguished cytogeneticists, the 1983 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine.
Throughout her life, she received various awards, including the Achievement Award of the American Association of University Women (1947), the Award of Merit by the Botanical Society of America (1957), the Kimber Genetics Award from the National Academy of Sciences (1967), the National Medal of Science (1970), the Lewis S. Rosentiel Award for Dis...
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