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. The commentseems strangely defensive, but the Nobel committee often comesunder criticism for its choices, and, as Watson knew well, BarbaraMcClintock s work had enjoyed, at best, mixed approbation sinceher 1951 symposium presentation.Today, though, the question most asked is certainly not why shebecame a Nobel laureate but rather: What took so long? Watson him-self and his colleague Francis H.C.Crick received their Nobel in 1962,nine years after their 1953 discovery of the structure of the DNAmolecule.McClintock s work on mobile genetic elements dates backto 1944 with a Nobel award in 1983, nearly 40 years later.Scien-tists like to say that science is self-correcting, but sometimes it takesawhile.In the case of Barbara McClintock, acknowledgement of herdiscoveries and their importance was admittedly a long time coming.Some people automatically point their fi ngers at facts like theseand chalk up the discrepancy to gender discrimination, and, asalready mentioned, McClintock did encounter some obstacles be-cause of what she sometimes called the anti-woman scientist bias. This time, though, the more likely explanation lay in the fl ow of con-temporary discovery and understanding of the work s importance.Watson and Crick s insight into the structure of DNA, followed byMarshall W.Nirenberg, Robert W.Holley, and Har Gobine Khorana sdeciphering of the genetic code in 1968, made the importanceof the two discoveries perfectly obvious.Clearly, if any changeoccurred in a single nucleotide, that part of the genetic code wouldconvey completely different hereditary information.The scientifi c community was not so well prepared in the 1940s50s for McClintock s concept of mobile genetic elements.Not onlydid the concept fl y in the face of the still-accepted pearls strung im-mutably on the chromosome view of genes but also McClintock pre-sented mobile elements in the context of maize, an organism that wasrelatively unfamiliar to much of the scientifi c community.Also, wasthe existence of mobile elements universal or was it restricted to therather complex biology of the maize plant? Once other researchersfound transposons in bacteria and insects, and then when transposi-tion of growth regulatory genes were seen to be involved in cancer,the Nobel committee had a clear path to distinguish McClintock withan unshared award and did so in short order.As one reporter put it, The world has fi nally begun to catch up to Barb McClintock. Reevaluation and Recognition 103the time for complaints. You re having a good time.You don t needpublic recognition.When you know you re right you don t care.You can t be hurt.You just know, sooner or later, it will come out inthe wash. McClintock was living the life she had longed for as a young highschool student in love with the process of finding out, with the joyinherent in the process of attaining knowledge, and now she took theopportunity to celebrate that lifestyle: It s such a pleasure, she toldthe reporters, to carry out an experiment when you think of some-thing carry it out and watch it go it s a great, great pleasure.I ve had a very, very satisfying and interesting life. The crowd of men and women in formal evening dress burst intothunderous applause when King Carl Gustaf of Sweden presentedthe Nobel award to McClintock.Her story had captured imagina-tions worldwide a response to her commitment to excellence andperseverance in face of adversity and prejudice.After the NobelIn the years that surrounded the Nobel award, a growing apprecia-tion built up for Barbara McClintock s extraordinary achievementdisplayed in a highly integrated body of work.With the discoveryof the structure of DNA, the Nobel announcement asserted thatMcClintock s work was one of the two great discoveries of our timesin genetics. The award made McClintock the first American womanto receive an unshared Nobel, the seventh woman to receive a NobelPrize in science, only the second recipient to have waited so long,and the first specializing in studies of large plant life.American evo-lutionary biologist Ernst Mayr offered this summary of McClintock soverall contribution in his book The Growth of Biological Thought:Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (1982): Barbara McClintockused [the] attributes of maize during thirty years of brilliant studiesfor an interpretation of gene action, the comprehensiveness of whichwas not generally realized until the molecular geneticists, years later,arrived at similar conclusions. In the wake of the Nobel Prize, many other honors were show-ered upon her, including induction into the National Women s Hallof Fame in 1986.None of them, however, was particularly welcomedby McClintock.Much of the attention centered on the fact that she 104 BARBARA MCCLINTOCKwas a woman.She was supportive of equal rights and job opportuni-ties not only for women but also for other minorities such as AfricanAmericans and Jews, and she accepted her responsibility of beinga role model a living promise of possibilities for women.Muchof this concept was positive, encouraging other women to broadentheir ideas of what kinds of behavior are appropriate for women.Much of her success was based on traits that many people thoughtof as masculine: aggressively protecting her freedom; playing therole of eccentric maverick; operating comfortably with an objective,rather than subjective, worldview; looking at the big picture or, aspeople might say today, thinking outside the box ; and, of course,wearing pants instead of dresses most of the time.However, peoplebegan to make claims about her that she did not embrace so enthu-siastically.When Keller s biography, A Feeling for the Organism,came out in 1983, some of the author s phrases, such as referencesto McClintock s intimate knowledge or a mystical understanding of maize, attracted the attention of readers who were looking for auniquely feminine form of science.While the biography is one ofthe strongest sources available on McClintock, it may have sufferedfrom McClintock s apparent distancing from the project after fiveinterviews.Seeing McClintock as a reclusive, brilliant mystic, Kellerdescribed a woman whose passion is for the individual, for the dif-ference. This focus on the particular attracted those who were putoff by the objectivity of science and who favored Eastern thoughtover Western traditions of rational thinking and scientific method.McClintock, however, clearly sought to uncover generalized, broad,fundamental biological truths based on the exploration of evidencetaken from the individual instances she studied observing greatbiological principles such as evolution through the window providedby maize plants.A controversy ensued, with most of those who knewher well seeing neither the recluse nor the mystic that Keller seemedto see
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