She was born in Connecticut, and christened Eleanor McLintock, the third child of a physician father and a Boston socialite from a Mayflower family. Her mother seems to have been very snobby, even introducing her husband to her socialite friends as ‘NOCD’ (Not Our Class Dearie). True to form, she seemed somewhat disappointed with Eleanor who showed a strong independent streak even from her second year. To her mother she lacked sufficient femininity for the name Eleanor so from at least age three called her Barbara – a name her mother felt was less feminine.
So Eleanor became Barbara for the rest of her life and it is not surprising that she developed rather negative feelings for her mother, apparently not allowing physical contact after the age of three. Also at this age, Barbara apparently expressed a very strong desire for freedom to do what she wanted, including the kinds of things that little boys liked to do. To her credit, her mother dressed Barbara in bloomers and sent her out to play with the boys. Any neighbours who might object were given an earful by this Boston Blueblood!
As soon as she entered school, Barbara realized that she loved to learn and to solve problems. She desperately wanted to go to college, and her desires won over her mother’s fears that such an education would make her unmarriageable or worse, a professor. She started out at the Agriculture Faculty at Cornell University.
University was a fantastic experience for Barbara. She had a ball taking and dropping as many courses as she was, at least for the moment, interested in. Pretty and brilliant, she was very popular and became women’s class president during her first year. Even so, with the number of courses she took and then dropped, and her lack of attention to marks, she graduated with just under a B average (which today would NOT qualify her for grad school). Cornell admitted her to a graduate program in Botany, which she loved. Barbara completed her masters and doctorate in genetics by the time she was 25. There were very few academic and even fewer government jobs for a woman at that time, so she remained at Cornell supported by post-doc fellowships.
Barbara was fascinated by cytogenetics, in which heredity is studied through the careful microscope examination of nuclear and cytoplasmic evidence. She became extraordinarily expert at examining chromosomes in maize. These chromosomes are remarkably small and thin, almost invisible when compared to salivary gland chromosomes in fruit flies. However, Barbara made them visible and for the first time ever, was able to distinguish them and characterize each of the ten.
After a few years, she got a university position, but she was unhappy having to cater to students and other university commitments, which cut into her time for research. Five years later, she quit. A university appointment did not provide the freedom she needed. Barbara was appointed to the research staff of the Cold Spring Harbor Carnegie research station on Long Island in New York. There she could do what she wanted when she wanted. Perfect! She stayed there until she died.
The corn she studied gave one field crop a year and possibly another over the winter in a greenhouse. She trusted no one with her plants, nurturing and protecting every one. At least once in a terrific windstorm, she alone was out there propping up her precious research material. She had ‘a feeling for the organism’ that was admired and envied.
She had hawk-eyes and interminable patience. She worked long after others left in the night and having little need of sleep, was the first there in the morning. She allowed only anointed, brilliant, and gentle friends to visit. Others were summarily dismissed, often politely. If interested scholars wrote her with questions she admired they were liable to get a twenty-five page typewritten letter in return.Otherwise, the inquiring letter “never arrived.”
She worked out the expressions and locations of many corn genes with a special interest in their mutations and interactions. In addition, she was able to develop systems conducive to genetic mutation. Because of the complicated nature of her experiments, many researchers found it difficult to understand her research papers. When others later repeated her work or couldn’t find the same thing in other organisms, or felt what she described wasn’t clear. She would say, “Wait a while, they’ll get it.”
In 1948, when she first described genes that moved from one place to another on the chromosomes, called transposons, few could bring themselves to believe such an outrageous idea. Yet, within a few years, transposons or ‘jumping’ genes, were shown to be common and an important mechanism in the function of the chromosomes. Even the insertion of viral DNA into host chromosomes to cause infection was related.
In about 1953, she got so fed up with her colleagues that she stopped publishing in journals requiring peer reviews. “They just don’t understand my work,” she said. For the last part of her life (she lived to 90 and researched to the end or close to it), she worked on the cytogenetics of all the maize varieties in North and South America. She established a number of labs in South America, and trained their scientists in her methods. She was a very demanding and tough teacher, but they loved her for it.
In 1983, she received the Nobel Prize for her work on genetic transposition, the movement of genetic material on the chromosomes.
Barbara McLintock died a couple of months after she was honoured with a volume of papers by her friends and colleagues — a memoir. I am absolutely certain that she found a lot of ideas she disagreed with in its hundreds of pages. In fact, I would hazard a guess that she was mumbling to herself over and over again, “NOCD”.
