Saturday, 11 February 2012


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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