Why is barbara mcclintock famous

McClintock returned to Cornell for several more years until, in , she accepted a position as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia from the influential maize geneticist Lewis Stadler. By , however, she believed that she would not gain tenure at Missouri, and left her job. This job turned into a full-time staff position the following year. In , after 26 years of committed research, McClintock retired from the Carnegie Institution, which awarded her a Distinguished Service Award.

She was invited to stay at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as a research scientist. She remained affiliated with the laboratory until her death in Throughout her long and distinguished career, McClintock's work focused on the genetics of maize and, in particular, the relationship between plant reproduction and subsequent mutation.

Beginning in the late s, she studied how genes in chromosomes could "move" during the breeding of maize plants. She did groundbreaking research on this phenomenon, where she determined the physical correlate of genetic crossing-over.

She remained affiliated with the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory until she died in McClintock is considered to be among the most distinguished scientists of the last century. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in She was one of only two other women to have received this honor at the time.

The existence of transposable elements was finally tested in the early s, when Nina Fedoroff and her team isolated and cloned the elements. McClintock's experiments on maize plants highlighted the instability of genetic material and stated the existence of transposable elements in the genome. Keywords: jumping genes , crossing-over , transposable elements , Epigenetics. Barbara McClintock's Transposon Experiments in Maize — Barbara McClintock conducted experiments on corn Zea mays in the United States in the mid-twentieth century to study the structure and function of the chromosomes in the cells.

Sources Comfort, Nathaniel C. Craig, Patricia P. Washington D. Emerson, Rollins Adams. Federoff, Nina, and David Botstein. Fox Keller, Evelyn. A Feeling for the Organism. New York: W. Freeman and Company, A new interpretation of the maturation divisions]. Cellule [Cell]. She lived to 90 years of age, continuing to conduct research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories until the time of her death. McClintock was among the most impactful scientists of the 20 th century and her dedication and perseverance are still a huge inspiration to many scientists all over the world.

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