Why was barbara mcclintocks work distrusted

Her mostly male colleagues were dubious if not outright hostile to her ideas. She ceased publishing on transposons in , when she realized "acutely, the extent of disinterest and lack of confidence in the conclusions" she was drawing.

McClintock is often made the poster woman for gender discrimination in the sciences, but this characterization is really not fair. It is true that early in her career she complained of her career prospects while an assistant professor at the University of Missouri.

But in , at the age of 44, McClintock was made a member of the National Academy of Sciences, only the third woman to be so honored. A year later, she was elected the first woman president of the Genetics Society of America.

Not until did she receive a belated Nobel Prize for her work on transposons. Many of the early pioneers of genetics were, by nature, loners who enjoyed solitude as much as many of us enjoy a long hug from someone we love. Gregor Mendel had his garden peas and monastic lifestyle. Thomas Hunt Morgan had his jars of fruit flies, ever searching for mutations. And McClintock? Well, McClintock loved the inner workings of maize. Growing up, McClintock felt comfortable being alone, however her bright, tomboy personality made her fun to hang around with.

When not outside, Barbara could sit for hours, reading in an empty room. Solitude became her soulmate. At Cornell University, McClintock started out like a fireball. Standing proudly at a hair above five feet, she joined a jazz band and played the tenor banjo at various gigs around Ithaca, New York. The rhythm of music, the beats and structure, comforted her, and she stuck with the banjo until her coursework began to overwhelm her desire to play.

Among many honors, he is the recipient of the G. Beadle Medal Genetics Society of America Michael Ashburner Then use your browser's back button to return. Michael Ashburner Biography. Michael Ashburner. It would take decades for the importance of this finding to be widely recognised but by the late seventies transposition was seemingly everywhere: it was the mechanism that could make bacteria resistant to antibiotics, make viruses infectious, or even cause cancer.

In McClintock received a Nobel Prize and the notion that her work had been long underappreciated came to the fore. Interviewers asked how she had managed to go on.