Barbara McClintock *1902-1922

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Cytogeneticist and Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock was born in 1902 in  Connecticut, USA. She earned a degree in botany and received her doctorate at Cornell University in 1927. She made several significant discoveries, but life as a woman in science remained challenging. After years in poorly paid and insecure jobs in Missouri, California and Berlin, she eventually took up a secure research position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York in 1941, remaining there until her retirement. During her university studies she had already begun making explorations in the new field of cytogenetics, with a focus on chromosomal analyses of maize. To perform these analyses, she bred generations of maize plants and studied their variations. Maize remained the object of her research throughout her professional career. In 1951, her experiments proved the existence of transposons, also known as “jumping genes.” Transposons are segments of DNA that can change their position within the same or another chromosome or plasmid. McClintock was also able to prove that genetic material is influenced by the environment. This con-tradicted prevailing opinions and it was not until the late 1970s that these groundbreaking discoveries were recognized for what they were. McClintock was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 for her discovery of mobile genetic elements.