Barbara McClintock
Ink and watercolor on 9″ x 12″ watercolor paper
The latest addition to the ‘She Changed the World’ collection!
Barbara McClintock (1902-1992) is one of the great minds in the history of the science of genetics. At a young age she discovered her love of science, and defied her mother’s resistance by going to Cornell University’s College of Agriculture. Her mother feared this would make her unmarriageable. She received her PhD in botany there and began her focus on maize cytogenetics, which was the focus of her research for the rest of her life. Her research was conducted at Cornell, the University of Missouri and notably at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Her studies into chromosomes and how they change during reproduction was generations ahead of its time. Her published studies were derided at the time by others in the field, leading to her ceasing publication of her findings in 1953. In the 1960’s and 1970’s others began to catch up to what she had been doing decades earlier. Awards and recognition for her contributions started quickly coming in, leading to her being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, of which she is the only woman to ever receive an unshared Nobel Prize in that category.