McClintock, Barbara

McClintock, Barbara, 1902–92, American geneticist. She discovered that certain genetic material, "transposable elements," shifted its location in the chromosomes from generation to generation. At first ignored, her research was later recognized as a major contribution to DNA research. In 1983 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

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McClintock, Barbara

(born June 16, 1902, Hartford, Conn., U.S.—died Sept. 2, 1992, Huntington, N.Y.) U.S. geneticist. She received her doctorate from Cornell University. In the 1940s and '50s, her experiments with variations in the coloration of kernels of corn revealed that genetic information is not stationary. She isolated two control elements in genetic material and found not only that they moved but that the change in position affected the behaviour of neighbouring genes, and she suggested that these elements were responsible for the diversity in cells during an organism's development. Her pioneering research, whose importance was not recognized for many years, eventually resulted in her being awarded a 1983 Nobel Prize.

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McClintock, Barbara (1902–92) geneticist; born in Hartford, Conn. She joined Cornell (1927–36), then served the National Research Council (1931–33) and the Guggenheim Foundation (1933–34). She joined the University of Missouri (1935–41), then became a staff member of the Carnegie Institution's laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. (1942–67), where she remained after her retirement. A solitary person, she devoted her life to the genetics of maize. Her discoveries in the 1940s and 1950s, that genes can control the behavior of other genes and can transpose themselves ("jump") on the chromosome, were belatedly recognized in her 1983 award of the Nobel Prize in physiology.