Mcclintock, Barbara (1902–1992)

Early Life and University

Barbara McClintock was born in Hartford, Connecticut, to parents Thomas McClintock, a doctor, and Sara McClintock, a pianist, poet, and painter. Her parents allowed her to follow her own interests rather than imposing a strict regime on her, even allowing her time off from school if she felt like doing something else. This would form much of her adult character, as she followed pursuits she loved solely for the joy of it.

McClintock wanted to go to college, but despite her rather liberal upbringing for a girl at the time, her mother was against it at first. Sara had already persuaded Barbara's older sisters, Marjorie and Mignon, not to go to college, despite Marjorie [Page 466]being offered scholarship money to attend Vassar. Eventually, after Barbara had worked for 6 months while also educating herself in the evenings, her mother relented and allowed her to go to Cornell University.

McClintock flourished at Cornell, and she continued her graduate studies there, gaining her doctorate in botany and genetics in 1927. In the years that followed, up until she left Cornell in 1932, she was a research assistant and botany instructor.

However, she was not simply granted her place in graduate school without any problems. She was originally told she could not enroll to study genetics because she was a woman. But women were allowed to study in the botany department, so she enrolled in cytology (the study of cells) and added in courses from the plant breeding department to combine both areas of interest. In 1931, McClintock and fellow student Harriet Creighton published a paper together called “A Correlation of Cytological and Genetical Crossing-over in Zea Mays.” This paper can be found in The Dynamic Genome (1992), edited by Nina Fedoroff and David Botstein.

By using a new staining technique developed by John Belling, McClintock was able to characterize the maize chromosomes by their lengths, patterns, and shapes. She continued her experiments and publications, consolidating the links she had discovered between cytology and genetics. By her mid-40s, however, McClintock's ideas were seen as so new or radical by some scientists that they were largely ignored, and her dense and complicated writing style did not make her papers easy to follow.

In 1939, she was elected vice president of the Genetics Society of America; she became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944; and in 1945 she served as president of the Genetics Society.

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