Barbara McClintock

Barbara McClintock was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She was the leader in the development of maize cytogenetics. Her research became well understood in the 1960s and 1970s. She died in 2011 at the age of 98.

About Barbara McClintock in brief

Barbara McClintock was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She was the leader in the development of maize cytogenetics. She discovered transposition and used it to demonstrate that genes are responsible for turning physical characteristics on and off. Her research became well understood in the 1960s and 1970s, as other scientists confirmed the mechanisms of genetic change and protein expression that she had demonstrated in her maize research in the 1940s and 1950s. She is the only woman to receive an unshared Nobel prize in that category. She died in 2011 at the age of 98. She had a son, Malcolm Rider, and a daughter, Marjorie, who were born in Connecticut in 1898. She lived with an aunt and uncle in Brooklyn, New York, until she began school. She studied botany, receiving a B. Sc. in 1923. Her interest in genetics began when she took a course in that field at Cornell University in 1921. She earned her PhD in 1925 and an MS in 1925. Her husband was a plant breeder and geneticist and she was married to him for more than 30 years, until his death in 1986. Her son Malcolm Rider was born in 1908. He was the son of British immigrants; his mother was descended from an old American Mayflower family. His father was a homeopathic physician and his mother a homeopath. He and his wife had four children, three boys and one girl. They had a difficult relationship with her mother, tension that started when she was young.

Her parents decided that Eleanor, a feminine name, was not appropriate for her, and chose Barbara instead. She graduated from high school early in 1919. She wanted to continue her studies at Cornell’s College of Agriculture. Her mother resisted sending her to college, for fear that she would be unmarriageable, something that was common at the time. Her father allowed her to start college, and she matriculated at Cornell in 1919, where she received a PhD in botany in 1927. She later went on to earn an MS and an M.S. in genetics, and later a doctorate in genetics and plant biology. She also worked as a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the California Institute of Technology. She wrote a book about her time at Cornell, which was published in 1950. She retired in 1973. She has been married to her husband, Malcolm, since 1984. She and her son have a son and a son-in-law, Michael Rider, who is a physician and a professor of biology at New York City’s City College of New York. He is the father of the film “Rescue Me,” about the life of Michael Douglas, starring Michael Douglas as the lead character in “The Godfather” and “The Lord of the Rings” as well as the author of several other books about Michael Douglas and his family. Her daughter, Mignon, is also a doctor and is married to Michael Rider.

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