By Jahnavi Dalmia, Research Team Member
Barbara McClintock is recognized as one of the most prominent women who changed the course of science. Born in Connecticut, USA, she studied at Cornell’s College of Agriculture, where she was introduced to the world of genetics. While at Cornell, she pursued cytogenetics, a field studying the relation between chromosomes (the genetic material in a cell) and cell behaviour. Her work on characterizing and identifying the ten maize chromosomes became a stepping stone for her future endeavors. Over the course of her academic career, she also undertook the role of an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri. Here, she discovered the breakage-fusion-bridge (BFB) cycle, which causes chromosome instability and is still vital in cancer research. She next pursued a full-time research position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which entailed laborious hours of work but offered her the intellectual freedom and excitement that she wanted.
McClintock’s work mostly consisted of analyzing maize kernel’s colour patterns and deducing a correlation with chromosomal loci. She hypothesized that a certain ‘thing’ moved from a location on the chromosome resulting in the observed phenotype, which was later named transposon/transposable elements, and led to her winning the Nobel prize in 1983. Her work was largely ignored by her colleagues for a decade but was later recognized as a true testament towards her perseverance and determination. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her discovery of transposition (jumping genes) and was the first woman to be the sole winner of this award. Her work revolutionized the way scientists conceived genetic inheritance, suggesting that an organism’s genome may be subject to alteration and rearrangement and is not as stable as widely believed previously.
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