Barbara mclintock – Wikipedia

Barbara McClintock (Hartford, June 16, 1902 – New York, September 2, 1992) It was an American biologist.
In the 1950s, with experiments on spades, improperly called “cobs”, of granuver discovered the existence of the transposons, that is, portions of DNA capable of moving from one chromosome to another; This discovery earned her the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1983.

Barbara McClintock was born in Hartford, in Connecticut in 1902, to Sara Hardy McClintock, pianist and painter, and by Thomas McClintock, by medical profession. He became passionate about science from high school, and then enrolled in Cornell University, willing to continue his studies in genetics. At that time, however, the only genetic courses were those of the Department of Plant improvement, whose access was prohibited to women. McClinTock therefore had to get around the problem, enrolling in the Botany Department and then specializing in cytology, bringing genetics as an accessory matter. After graduation, he worked for a short time for Cornell University herself, as a paid assistant, taking care of the cenogenetics of corn. Some of his works on the chromosomes of the corn plant were published on Science .

In 1927 he obtained the Ph.D. and was hired by Cornell University as a non -role teacher; He continued to devote himself to studies on the genetics of corn, together with other colleagues, and on genetic recombination in these plants. In 1931 he published the results of his research in a job in which he showed that recombination was due to a physical exchange of parts of homologous chromosomes, work, this, which made a considerable contribution to the study of genetics, at the time still at the dawn.

In 1936 he abandoned Cornwell to move to the University of Missouri, who had offered her a place of professor. Here the McClinTock worked for six years concentrating his studies on the corn chromosomes damaged by exposure to X -rays. Subsequently, in 1941, he moved again, this time to work as a researcher at the Genetics Department of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Washington. Here continued his studies on the chromosomal mutations of corn, and was during the years spent at Carnegie who began to be interested in some abnormal behaviors of the chromosomes that would have led her to its most important discovery, that of the existence of the transposons. In the meantime, in 1944, a member of the National Academy of Sciences was elected, and in 1945 he became president of the Genetic Society of America. He always concluded his studies on the transposons, demonstrating their existence and their ability to move from one position to another within the chromosomes and to give rise to unstable mutations. He presented his works in 1951 and later published them in various scientific journals, but the reaction of the scientific community was wary, when not openly hostile. In those years, women were still underestimated in the scientific field, and this did not help McClinTock to be believed. In addition to this, its conclusions were so innovative and revolutionary as to be in contrast with the scientific vision of the time, that she wanted genes as fixed entity on chromosomes, unable to move. It should be remembered that, in the early 1950s, the knowledge in genetics was still somewhat nebulous: just think that the discovery of the DNA double propeller structure took place in 1953, therefore two years after the publication of the work of the McClinTock. Frustrated by the negative response to his research, McClinTock still continued his studies on the transposons for many years, until his retirement.

It was only in the early seventies, when he had now abandoned the work, that the MC Clintock saw his merit recognized. The enormous steps forward made by the techniques of genetics and molecular biology allowed to highlight the existence of the elements transponible in many living beings, as well as in corn, and the studies of the McClinTock were revalued and appreciated. Thus received the National Medal of Science in 1970, the Horwitz Prize and the Wolf Award in 1981 and finally the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1983 ^[first] , 35 years after the first publication of his works on the transposons.

Barbara McClintock died in New York in 1992, at 90 years old.

• ( IN ) Barbara McClintock . are British encyclopedia Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
• Barbara McClintock . are Enciclopediadelondonne.it , Women’s encyclopedia.
• ( IN ) Barbara McClintock . are nobelprize.org .
• ( IN ) Works by Barbara McClintock . are Open Library , Internet Archive.
• ( IN ) Biography of Barbara McClintock, from the Library.cshl.edu website . are library.cshl.edu . URL consulted on February 7, 2008 (archived by URL Original August 21, 2011) .