Barbara McClintock
Barbara McClintock
Celebrating a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist
Barbara Mcclintock’s experimental corn gardens yielded crucial clues about the plant’s genetic material. In 1929, she became the first person to identify all ten maize chromosomes. In the late 1940s, while studying the tendency of a specific chromosome to break, she discovered that some genes can move to a new location on a chromosome; not all genes were fixed in place, as was generally believed. In 1983, more than 30 years later, McClintock received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine at the age of 81.
