Barbara McClintock (1902-1992)

Barbara McClintock was
a geneticist whom received a Nobel Prize for discovering that genes could move
from place to place on a chromosome. McClintock’s father was a physician but at
a young age, she was forced to live with relatives in the country which in
return developed her deep love of nature. After graduating from high school,
she took a job rather than go on to college, because she lacked parental
support. However she studied privately and got accepted to Cornell University
as biology major. Being a Jew and a
woman, McClintock received a lot of rejections. In the 1940s she experimented,
alone without a researching team, with variations in the coloration of corn and
revealed that genetic information on the chromosomes are not stationary. She
also found out that genes that change their position on the chromosome may also
affect the behaviour of neighbouring genes which could be responsible for the
vast variations of the same species. In 1983 McClintock was awarded with a
Nobel Prize, she then died at the age of ninety in 1992.
"Barbara McClintock Biography |
BookRags.com." BookRags.com | Study Guides, Lesson Plans, Book Summaries and More. Web. 08 Feb. 2012. <http://www.bookrags.com/biography/barbara-mcclintock/>.
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