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The genes that jump
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.
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