About Barbara McClintock
Country of Birth
United States
Industry
Science
Top Achievements
Barbara McClintock was an American scientist, viewed as one of the pioneering figures in modern genetics. Her discovery of mobile genetic elements/transposable elements, or “jumping genes,” won her the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1983.
Early Life and Education
Barbara McClintock was born on June 16, 1902, in Hartford, Connecticut, to homeopathic physician Thomas Henry McClintock and his wife, Sara. At the age of three, she went to live with her aunt and uncle in Brooklyn, New York. In 1908, her parents joined her in Brooklyn. In 1919, she graduated early from Erasmus Hall High School.
In high school, McClintock discovered her love for science and enrolled as a biology major at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture, completing her bachelor’s degree in 1923. During this time, Cornell prohibited women from studying genetics, so she received her master’s and doctorate degrees – earned in 1925 and 1927, respectively – in botany from Cornell’s Plant Breeding Department.
Early Career
During her graduate and postgraduate studies, McClintock began the work that would occupy her entire professional life: the chromosomal analysis of corn. In 1931 she provided the first experimental proof that genes were physically positioned on chromosomes, pioneering the new scientific field of cytogenetics. In 1933 she took up an Assistant Professorship in the Department of Botany at the University of Missouri. In 1941 she accepted a research position at the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Genetics Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where she dedicated the rest of her career.
Achievements in Her Field
McClintock was elected Vice President of the Genetics Society of America in 1939 and later became President in 1944. That same year she was also elected to the National Academy of Sciences— she was the third woman to ever achieve this status.
McClintock’s discovery of transposable elements represented a revolutionary concept that was ahead of its time. It was considered too radical or was simply ignored by the scientific community for many years. She was finally credited with discovering transposition after new technologies enabled other researchers to observe the same process in bacteria and yeast in the late 1960s.
Recognition
When recognition finally came, McClintock was flooded with awards and honors, including the National Medal of Science in 1970 – the first woman to receive this award – and the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and awarded 14 Honorary Doctor of Science degrees. In 1986 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
She received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1983, the first woman to win that prize unshared, and the first American woman to win any unshared Nobel Prize.
Additional Facts
- McClintock died of natural causes on September 2, 1992, at the age of 90. She never married or had children.
- McClintock is featured in the United States Postal Service’s “American Scientists” 2005 commemorative postage stamp series, and in a 1989 series from Sweden that illustrated the work of Nobel Prize-winning geneticists.
