★★★★☆ A brilliant but impenetrable scientist

A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock

Evelyn Fox Keller

Barbara McClintock (1902 - 1992) won the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 for work she began in the 1940s on what we now call transposons -- mobile genetic elements, "jumping genes", in maize (what in the USA we usually call "corn"). Although The Nobel Committee often takes a long time to recognize important work, this was a longer gap than usual. That was partly because she was a woman, but it was also because her work was difficult for her contemporaries to understand. The science is genuinely difficult. Even I, a card-carrying geneticist, find genetics papers among the most difficult to understand. Furthermore, McClintock was just a terrible, terrible writer. But in the 70s transposons were rediscovered in bacteria and other organisms. (The word "transposon" dates from those years.) They were discovered to be of fundamental importance. For instance, HIV is a type of transposon. It helped also that in the 70s recombinant DNA technology was developed and made the study of transposons much more straightforward.

Although it is fair to view McClintock's life as an example of the struggles women in science faced (and still face), the full story is more complicated than that. She struggled in part for reasons that would have caused a man to struggle, too. Her work was genuinely esoteric, and she was a terrible communicator. It's a more complicated story than most people want to hear, and Evelyn Fox Keller tells it fairly and sympathetically. McClintock was a member, arguably the star, of the maize genetics group at Cornell university. There's a great photo in the book of the group, which includes at least two future Nobel Laureates, McClintock herself and George Beadle. She was an irrepressible ball of fire, and her spirit comes through vividly in this biography.

McClintock accepted a permanent position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where she worked until her death. Fox Keller tells an anecdote that encapsulated how McClintock was viewed by fellow scientists. One scientist mentioned to another McClintock's suggestion that genes could hop around in genomes, an idea that seemed extremely implausible at the time. The second scientist answered that, if McClintock said it was so, it must be true. She was The Best!

Evelyn Fox Keller is herself a scientist of some note. She along with Lee Segel developed one of the most important mathematical models in biology. She is also well-known for her work on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science.

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