Barbara McClintock (June 16,1902-September 2,1992) was considered one of America's most distinguished cytogeneticists. She received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 for her discovery of mobile genetic elements called transposons.
Biographical details
Barbara McClintock was born in Hartford, Connecticut. She received her secondary education Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, New York, and later earned B.Sc.(1923), M.A. (1925) and Ph.D. (1927) degrees from Cornell University. Women at Cornell were not allowed to major in genetics, but she became a member of an influential group studying cytogenetics in maize. McClintock was awarded several postdoctoral fellowships from the National Research Council, the Guggenheim Foundation which allowed her to continue to study genetics at Cornell, the University of Missouri, and the California Institute of Technology, she also had a six months of training in Germay in 1933 - 1934. After returning from Germany early due to political tension in Europe, she remained at Cornell until 1936, when she accepted an Assistant Professorship offered to her by Lewis Stadler at the University of Missouri in the Department of Botany.
McClintock believed that she would not gain tenure at Missouri and in 1941, McClintock joined the staff of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Genetics Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. After her year-long appointment she was offered a full-time posiition and she remained wokring at the at Cold Spring Harbor until her death in 1992.
Throughout her long career she held many prestigious positions and received numerous awards and Honorary Doctorates . In 1944 she became the third woman to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and the first woman president of the Genetics Society of America in 1945. She was awarded the National Medal of Science by Richard Nixon in 1971. In 1981 she became the first recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Grant, and was awarded the Albert and Mary Lasker Award. Most notably, she received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1983, credited by the Nobel Foundation for discovering "mobile genetic elements", nearly 40 years after she initially described the phenmenon she described as controlling elements.
External links
Reference
Books
- Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock, W. H. Freeman & Co, 1984
