Barbara McClintock Lecture

This lecture series honours Barbara McClintock, the pioneering corn geneticist James Watson called one of the three most important figures in biology in this century.

She obtained her PhD at Cornell University. At the time, there were few academic positions for women so she took a number of fellowships at Cornell, Caltech and later became Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri. She left Missouri because her advancement was blocked and, in 1941, she joined the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, remaining there for the rest of her life.

McClintock's incisive and brilliant cytogenetic studies of the 1930s let to the consolidation of the chromosome theory of inheritance, and to the discovery of the nucleolar organizer. From the 1940s onward, she discovered and characterized mobile genetic elements in maize, 40 years before their molecular basis was understood.

Among her many honors, Barbara McClintock was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1944, received the National Medal of Science in 1970, and was appointed a MacArthur Fellow in 1981. In 1983 she became only the third woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize for her work on mobile elements. She died in 1992, universally admired for her extraordinary record of getting things right, based on observation and simple, elegant experiments that were years ahead of her time.