A lifelong geneticist Barbara McClintock challenged conventional ideas despite restrictions for women in academia
Barbara McClintock was born Eleanor McClintock on June 16, 1902, in Connecticut. As a young girl, her parents decided to rename her Barbara, as they believed that “Eleanor” had “feminine” and “delicate” connotations that did not suit her. McClintock would continue to break gender norms and argue against conventional notions in the scientific realm as she matured.
Although she was accepted to the Cornell College of Agriculture, McClintock almost could not attend. Her mother believed that going to college would ruin her chances of marriage, but luckily, her father returned from war just in time to reverse this decision. At Cornell, McClintock enrolled in the only available course teaching genetics, and quickly became immersed in the study of chromosomes and heredity. McClintock would go on to receive her master’s and doctorate degrees at Cornell by researching the cytogenetics of maize.
After Cornell, McClintock initially worked as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, but she regarded teaching as a distraction from research. She left her job to become a full-time researcher at Cold Spring Harbor, where she began investigating the influence of genes on the mosaic color patterns of maize. She believed that the color changes were too frequent to be random mutations, and instead proposed an alternative theory: that there were transposons, or “jumping genes.” She went against the prevailing narrative of genes being fixed in place, instead proposing that they could move within chromosomes. This movement switches gene expression on and off, which controls phenotypic traits.
Aware that her findings contradicted the contemporary understanding of genetics and mutations, McClintock waited several years for other geneticists to confirm her results. When they came to the same conclusion, McClintock was finally ready to share her theory. “I just knew I was right,” she said. Despite her conviction, her theory was met with hostility when she first presented it at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where she worked. Faced with ridicule and criticism, she stopped publishing and lecturing, but her passion for genetics never ceased. McClintock continued working in her lab to advance her theory, giving her the freedom to explore her interests without needing to defend her views.
Finally, in 1983, other scientists began to arrive at the same results, and McClintock’s work was acknowledged as she received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. With her dedication to pursuing knowledge and perseverance in the face of skepticism, McClintock left a sizable imprint on the field of genetics, evolutionary biology, and medicine. She revolutionized how we study the regulation and inheritance of genes, and her work continues to influence modern research in the genetic code.