Item GS/8/9/2/13 - Photograph of Barbara McClintock, Cold Spring Harbour.

Extent: 1 photograph

Black and white photograph of Barbara McClintock with her maize plants (transposon corn), Cold Spring Harbour.

Admin History: Barbara McClintock: (June 16, 1902 – September 2, 1992), an American scientist and cytogeneticist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In the summer of 1944 at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, McClintock began systematic studies on the mechanisms of the mosaic color patterns of maize seed and the unstable inheritance of this mosaicism. She identified two new dominant and interacting genetic loci that she named Dissociator (Ds) and Activator (Ac). She found that the Dissociator did not just dissociate or cause the chromosome to break, it also had a variety of effects on neighboring genes when the Activator was also present, which included making certain stable mutations unstable During the 1940s and 1950s, McClintock discovered transposition and used it to demonstrate that genes are responsible for turning physical characteristics on and off. She developed theories to explain the suppression and expression of genetic information from one generation of maize plants to the next. Due to skepticism of her research and its implications, she stopped publishing her data in 1953. Later, she made an extensive study of the cytogenetics and ethnobotany of maize races from South America. McClintock's research became well understood in the 1960s and 1970s, as other scientists confirmed the mechanisms of genetic change and genetic regulation that she had demonstrated in her maize research in the 1940s and 1950s. Awards and recognition for her contributions to the field followed, including the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded to her in 1983 for the discovery of genetic transposition.