Born on June 16, 1902, in Hartford, Connecticut, Barbara McClintock liked reading, playing baseball and, as she said, ╥thinking about things.╙ She took great pleasure in science. Her mother, however, worried that her child was not becoming feminine enough╤that she might become ╥a strange person, a person that didn╒t belong to society╙╤and she opposed any further education beyond high school for her daughter. McClintock responded by spending all her free time for the next year in the library, reading and studying on her own. Her parents eventually acquiesced, and she enrolled at Cornell University in 1919 as a biology major.
Throughout college, McClintock concentrated on her studies, never distracted, she said, by close personal relationships with other persons. She received her B.S. in 1923, her M.A. two years later, and, having specialized in cytology, genetics and zoology, finished her Ph.D. in 1927. While in graduate school she began the work that would occupy her entire life, the chromosomal analysis of maize. Studying the genetics of corn, she used a microscope and a staining technique that allowed her to examine, identify and describe individual corn chromosomes.
In 1931 she and a colleague, Harriet Creighton, published ╥A Correlation of Cytological and Genetical Crossing-over in Zea mays,╙ a paper that established that chromosomes formed the basis of genetics. Based on her experiments and publications during the 1930s, she was elected vice president of the Genetics Society of America in 1939 and president of the Genetics Society in 1944. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1933 to study in Germany, but left early due to the rise of Nazism. When she returned to Cornell, she found that the university would not hire a female professor. Instead, the Rockefeller Foundation funded her research at Cornell for two years, until finally, in 1936, she was invited to become an assistant professor at the University of Missouri.
In 1941, McClintock moved to Long Island to work at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where she spent the rest of her professional life. In 1944, the same year that McClintock was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, she began research on transposition╤the notion that there exist shifting and movable elements she called transposable elements (later called ╥jumping genes╙) on a chromosome that control the supposedly random movement of some genes on the chromosome. Ahead of its time, however, McClintock╒s work was for many years considered too radical╤or was simply not considered at all╤by her fellow scientists. Deeply disappointed with her colleagues, McClintock stopped publishing the results of her work and she ceased giving lectures, though she continued doing research. ╥They called me crazy, absolutely mad at times,╙ she said later. Not until the late 1960s and 1970s, after biologists had determined that the genetic material was DNA, did members of the scientific community begin to verify her findings from 1951.
When recognition finally came, McClintock was inundated with awards and honors╤the Kimber Genetics Award from the National Academy of Sciences, 1967; the National Medal of Science, 1970; Brandeis University╒s Rosenstiel Award 1978; the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award 1981; Israel╒s Wolf Foundation Prize, 1981; and a lifetime MacArthur Laureate Award of $60,000 annually, beginning 1981, among others. In 1983, at the age of 81, McClintock became the first woman to win an unshared Nobel prize for medicine or physiology. When asked at the time about her years of neglect by the scientific community, she said only that ╥if you know you╒re right, you don╒t care. You know that sooner or later, it will come out in the wash.╙ McClintock died in Huntington, New York, on September 2, 1992.
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