Barbara McClintock was an American scientist and a pioneer in the field of cytogenetics. She is credited with the discovery of genetic transposition, or “jumping genes,” which showed that genes are responsible for switching the physical traits of an organism on or off.

Her studies on maize (corn) were years ahead of their time and considered too radical to be taken seriously by her peers. Facing skepticism about her research and its implications, she stopped publishing her data in 1953.

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It would not be until the age of 81, in 1983, that her fellow scientists would realize that she was right all along when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her discovery of genetic transposition. As of 2022, she remains the only woman who has received an unshared Nobel Prize in that category.

McClintock loved science as a child and early on exhibited an independence that she would carry throughout her life. She enrolled as a biology major at Cornell University in 1919, earning her bachelor of science in 1923, a master’s degree two years later, and in 1927 a doctor of philosophy after specializing in cytology, genetics, and zoology.

After she completed her PhD, Cornell appointed McClintock to the role of instructor in the Botany Department, and she began what would become her life’s work: the chromosomal analysis of maize. She began guiding Harriet B. Creighton, a graduate student, and in 1931, the pair published their groundbreaking discovery of chromosomal crossover. This had been proposed as a theory 20 years earlier by Thomas Morgan to account for the way offspring inherit genes from their parents, and McClintock and Creighton proved the theory was correct.

As a result of her experiments and publications, McClintock was elected Vice President of the Genetics Society of America in 1939 and President of the Genetics Society in 1944. However, it would not be until the late 1960s and ‘70s that members of the scientific community would begin to verify her early findings.

After winning the Nobel Prize, she was a key leader and researcher in the field of genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York. She died at the age of 90 from natural causes.

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