Nobel prize winner Barbara McClintock  is one of the greatest  geneticists of this century! Her studies in the mutation of maize (corn) led to her discovery that genes could move from one chromosome to another. This radical idea was initially rejected by the scientific community and it took thirty years before this important advancement was recognized and accepted. This discovery is very much at the root of today’s genetic engineering.

Barbara McClintock was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the third of four children, to physician Thomas Henry McClintock and Sara Handy McClintock. She spent some of her early childhood living with relatives in Massachusetts where she developed a deep love of nature that lasted a lifetime. Barbara graduated from high school with dreams of attending Cornell to further her love of science. Lack of financial and parental support almost prevented her from college but in 1919 Barbara enrolled at Cornell’s College of Agriculture.

While studying botany  Barbara discovered her love of genetics and she graduated from Cornell with a BS in 1923, an MA in 1925  and a PhD in 1927. While a graduate student at Cornell University’s College of Agricultural, Barbara worked with faculty and other graduate students  pioneering the development of hybrid corn. Her work with chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize was groundbreaking. She also produced the first genetic map for maize.

In 1941 she was offered a research position at the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Genetics Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. During the 1940’s and 1950’s Barbara won many honors and prestigious fellowships. In 1944, in recognition of her prominence in the field of genetics, McClintock was elected to the National Academy of Sciences—only the third woman to be so elected. In 1945, she became the first woman president of the Genetics Society of America.

It was during the decade of the 1940s that she began the work which was later to result in the Nobel Prize. Essentially, it was her discovery that genes "jumped" from place to place in a chromosome, what she called transposable genetic elements. Since accepted opinion had it that genes were static, rather like beads on a string, her theory was generally received with either hostility or a lack of understanding.

When the field of genetic engineering became prominent in the 1980’s, her earlier work was rediscovered and in 1981 she was awarded the prestigious Wolfe Prize in Medicine for her work, as well as the Lasker Award. The MacArthur Foundation appointed her its first Prize Fellow Laureate; then in 1983 she received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, the only woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in that category!

McClintock was awarded 14 Honorary Doctor of Science degrees and an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters during her lifetime. She died in Huntington, New York, in 1992. A small building at Cornell University and a laboratory building at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory bear her name.