The genes that jump
Right in 1950, believed in 1980, Nobel in 1983
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McClintock worked alone at Cold Spring Harbor and published her findings in 1950 and 1951. The reaction was indifference — she stopped publishing on the subject in 1953 because there was nobody to discuss it with. Only when molecular biologists found the same mobile elements in bacteria and fruit flies in the 1970s was she read again. Transposons make up roughly half the human genome. She received the Nobel Prize in 1983, unshared, the first woman to take the medicine prize alone.
For children
Barbara McClintock studied colour patterns on maize kernels and discovered that pieces of genetic material can move from one place to another within the cell. It broke with everything believed about genes sitting still. Almost nobody believed her for thirty years.
Sources
- McClintock, PNAS 36 (1950) — «The Origin and Behavior of Mutable Loci in Maize»
- Keller, A Feeling for the Organism (1983)
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