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A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock
A biography of the Nobel Prize-winning scientist explains her work in genetics and traces her long unheralded career as a research scientist
235 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1983
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894 people want to read
About the author
Evelyn Fox Keller
40 books60 followersEvelyn Fox Keller (born 1936) is an American physicist, author, and feminist and is currently a Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Keller has also taught at New York University and in the department of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.
Keller received her B.A. in physics from Brandeis University in 1957 and continued her studies in theoretical physics at Harvard University graduating with a Ph.D. in 1963. She became interested in molecular biology during a visit to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory while completing her Ph.D. dissertation. Her subsequent research has focused on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science.
She is also on the advisory board of FFIPP-USA (Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace-USA), a network of Palestinian, Israeli, and International faculty, and students, working in for an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and just peace.
Keller received her B.A. in physics from Brandeis University in 1957 and continued her studies in theoretical physics at Harvard University graduating with a Ph.D. in 1963. She became interested in molecular biology during a visit to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory while completing her Ph.D. dissertation. Her subsequent research has focused on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science.
She is also on the advisory board of FFIPP-USA (Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace-USA), a network of Palestinian, Israeli, and International faculty, and students, working in for an end of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and just peace.
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July 25, 2025
A brilliant but impenetrable scientist
Barbara McClintock (1902 - 1992) won the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 for work she began in the 1940s on what we now call transposons -- mobile genetic elements, "jumping genes", in maize (what in the USA we usually call "corn"). Although The Nobel Committee often takes a long time to recognize important work, this was a longer gap than usual. That was partly because she was a woman, but it was also because her work was difficult for her contemporaries to understand. The science is genuinely difficult. Even I, a card-carrying geneticist, find genetics papers among the most difficult to understand. Furthermore, McClintock was just a terrible, terrible writer. But in the 70s transposons were rediscovered in bacteria and other organisms. (The word "transposon" dates from those years.) They were discovered to be of fundamental importance. For instance, HIV is a type of transposon. It helped also that in the 70s recombinant DNA technology was developed and made the study of transposons much more straightforward.
Although it is fair to view McClintock's life as an example of the struggles women in science faced (and still face), the full story is more complicated than that. She struggled in part for reasons that would have caused a man to struggle, too. Her work was genuinely esoteric, and she was a terrible communicator. It's a more complicated story than most people want to hear, and Evelyn Fox Keller tells it fairly and sympathetically. McClintock was a member, arguably the star, of the maize genetics group at Cornell university. There's a great photo in the book of the group, which includes at least two future Nobel Laureates, McClintock herself and George Beadle. She was an irrepressible ball of fire, and her spirit comes through vividly in this biography.
McClintock accepted a permanent position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where she worked until her death. Fox Keller tells an anecdote that encapsulated how McClintock was viewed by fellow scientists. One scientist mentioned to another McClintock's suggestion that genes could hop around in genomes, an idea that seemed extremely implausible at the time. The second scientist answered that, if McClintock said it was so, it must be true. She was The Best!
Evelyn Fox Keller is herself a scientist of some note. She along with Lee Segel developed one of the most important mathematical models in biology. She is also well-known for her work on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science.
Blog review.
Barbara McClintock (1902 - 1992) won the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 for work she began in the 1940s on what we now call transposons -- mobile genetic elements, "jumping genes", in maize (what in the USA we usually call "corn"). Although The Nobel Committee often takes a long time to recognize important work, this was a longer gap than usual. That was partly because she was a woman, but it was also because her work was difficult for her contemporaries to understand. The science is genuinely difficult. Even I, a card-carrying geneticist, find genetics papers among the most difficult to understand. Furthermore, McClintock was just a terrible, terrible writer. But in the 70s transposons were rediscovered in bacteria and other organisms. (The word "transposon" dates from those years.) They were discovered to be of fundamental importance. For instance, HIV is a type of transposon. It helped also that in the 70s recombinant DNA technology was developed and made the study of transposons much more straightforward.
Although it is fair to view McClintock's life as an example of the struggles women in science faced (and still face), the full story is more complicated than that. She struggled in part for reasons that would have caused a man to struggle, too. Her work was genuinely esoteric, and she was a terrible communicator. It's a more complicated story than most people want to hear, and Evelyn Fox Keller tells it fairly and sympathetically. McClintock was a member, arguably the star, of the maize genetics group at Cornell university. There's a great photo in the book of the group, which includes at least two future Nobel Laureates, McClintock herself and George Beadle. She was an irrepressible ball of fire, and her spirit comes through vividly in this biography.
McClintock accepted a permanent position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where she worked until her death. Fox Keller tells an anecdote that encapsulated how McClintock was viewed by fellow scientists. One scientist mentioned to another McClintock's suggestion that genes could hop around in genomes, an idea that seemed extremely implausible at the time. The second scientist answered that, if McClintock said it was so, it must be true. She was The Best!
Evelyn Fox Keller is herself a scientist of some note. She along with Lee Segel developed one of the most important mathematical models in biology. She is also well-known for her work on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science.
Blog review.
March 21, 2008
Quotes I love---
"The word 'understanding' and the particular meaning she attributed to it, is the cornerstone of Barbara McClintock's entire approach to science. For her, the smallest details provided the keys to the larger whole. It was her conviction that the closer her focus, the greater her attention to individual detail, to the unique characteristics of a single plant, of a single kernel, of a single chromosome, the more she could learn about the general principles by which the maize plant as a whole was organized, the better her 'feeling for the organism.'" (101)
"The crucial point of this story, to her, is the state of mind required in making such judgments. 'It is done with complete confidence, complete understanding. I understood every plant. Without being able to know what I was integrating, I understood the phenotype.' What does understanding mean here? 'It means that I was using a computer that was working very rapidly and very perfectly. I couldn't train anyone to do that."'" (102-103)
"Her virtuosity resided in her capacity to observe, and to process and interpret what she observed. As she grew older, it became less and less possible to delegate any part of her work; she was developing skills that she could hardly identify herself, much less impart to others. /The nature of insight in science, as elsewhere, is notoriously elusive. And almost all great scientists--those who learn to cultivate insight--learn also to respect its mysterious workings. It is here that their rationality finds its own limits. In defying rational explanation, the process of creative insight inspires awe in those who experience it. They come to know, trust, and value it." (103)
"The word 'understanding' and the particular meaning she attributed to it, is the cornerstone of Barbara McClintock's entire approach to science. For her, the smallest details provided the keys to the larger whole. It was her conviction that the closer her focus, the greater her attention to individual detail, to the unique characteristics of a single plant, of a single kernel, of a single chromosome, the more she could learn about the general principles by which the maize plant as a whole was organized, the better her 'feeling for the organism.'" (101)
"The crucial point of this story, to her, is the state of mind required in making such judgments. 'It is done with complete confidence, complete understanding. I understood every plant. Without being able to know what I was integrating, I understood the phenotype.' What does understanding mean here? 'It means that I was using a computer that was working very rapidly and very perfectly. I couldn't train anyone to do that."'" (102-103)
"Her virtuosity resided in her capacity to observe, and to process and interpret what she observed. As she grew older, it became less and less possible to delegate any part of her work; she was developing skills that she could hardly identify herself, much less impart to others. /The nature of insight in science, as elsewhere, is notoriously elusive. And almost all great scientists--those who learn to cultivate insight--learn also to respect its mysterious workings. It is here that their rationality finds its own limits. In defying rational explanation, the process of creative insight inspires awe in those who experience it. They come to know, trust, and value it." (103)
March 24, 2010
For Ada Lovelace day this year, I decided to read a book about a female scientist with whom I wasn't familiar. After some searchin--in which I discovered that nearly every book I could find about Maria Mitchell, the first prominent female astronomer was for kids--I settled on Barbara McClintock, a pioneering geneticist and cytologist who worked from the 1920s into the 1980s. Some thoughts:
* Keller does a nice job oscillating between discussion of McClintock's work and summaries of the concepts and ideas circulating in the field at the time. These chapters taxed my atrophied Advanced Placement Bio 2 knowledge, but were ultimately decipherable. The book does leave a few questions for me in its age: having been published in 1983, it doesn't cover the continuing influence of her work in the succeeding 27 years.
* McClintock faced a number of challenges early in her career based on her temperament and her sex. At one point, Keller quotes McClintock saying something to the effect of, "I could have been a maverick or a woman, but being both was a major hinderance." Wikipedia mentions a later biography that disputes whether McClintock faced professional barriers because of her sex, but Keller's reports of places where her superiors openly said a woman wouldn't be offered a research position make that hard to buy, in my mind. To be fair, I haven't read that other biography.
* McClintock made a number of key discoveries, which I will try to relate here with a layman's understanding of this stuff: she developed a number of new ways to document meiosis and chromosomes, and her early study of maize chromosomes provided evidence to support several key ideas in the 1920s.
* She discovered transposition in maize in the 1950s, but the idea was so contextualized and difficult to understand outside that narrow field that it didn't really get traction until others discovered it in the late 1960s and later. In 1983 she won the Nobel prize for this discovery.
* She also did some work helping biologists in South America preserve species of maize that were threatened, and realized that the chromosomal differences documented the human migratory pattern across the region. Her survey of the species and reports to anthropologists were also important.
* My favorite story, though, comes from 1944. McClintock was invited to Stanford where they were studying some kind of mold for which the cytology (meiosis, etc) had not yet been worked out. She was there for about a week before she figured it out and explained it to everybody. Kick ass.
Keller's biography is largely laudatory, with a little nod to the fact that McClintock's personality had a lot to do with the ill will she felt from many. But it goes a long way to document how her differing perspective, one of surveying the whole subject (hence the title) gave her insights that led to new bits of knowledge.
* Keller does a nice job oscillating between discussion of McClintock's work and summaries of the concepts and ideas circulating in the field at the time. These chapters taxed my atrophied Advanced Placement Bio 2 knowledge, but were ultimately decipherable. The book does leave a few questions for me in its age: having been published in 1983, it doesn't cover the continuing influence of her work in the succeeding 27 years.
* McClintock faced a number of challenges early in her career based on her temperament and her sex. At one point, Keller quotes McClintock saying something to the effect of, "I could have been a maverick or a woman, but being both was a major hinderance." Wikipedia mentions a later biography that disputes whether McClintock faced professional barriers because of her sex, but Keller's reports of places where her superiors openly said a woman wouldn't be offered a research position make that hard to buy, in my mind. To be fair, I haven't read that other biography.
* McClintock made a number of key discoveries, which I will try to relate here with a layman's understanding of this stuff: she developed a number of new ways to document meiosis and chromosomes, and her early study of maize chromosomes provided evidence to support several key ideas in the 1920s.
* She discovered transposition in maize in the 1950s, but the idea was so contextualized and difficult to understand outside that narrow field that it didn't really get traction until others discovered it in the late 1960s and later. In 1983 she won the Nobel prize for this discovery.
* She also did some work helping biologists in South America preserve species of maize that were threatened, and realized that the chromosomal differences documented the human migratory pattern across the region. Her survey of the species and reports to anthropologists were also important.
* My favorite story, though, comes from 1944. McClintock was invited to Stanford where they were studying some kind of mold for which the cytology (meiosis, etc) had not yet been worked out. She was there for about a week before she figured it out and explained it to everybody. Kick ass.
Keller's biography is largely laudatory, with a little nod to the fact that McClintock's personality had a lot to do with the ill will she felt from many. But it goes a long way to document how her differing perspective, one of surveying the whole subject (hence the title) gave her insights that led to new bits of knowledge.
December 20, 2015
In the view of the neo-Darwinians, evolution results from natural selection acting on random mutation. In contrast, Keller writes of Barbara McClintock, “that the genetic apparatus is more labile and flexible than the central dogma allowed.” “[I]f genetic elements were subject to a system of regulation and control that involved their rearrangement,” Keller writes of this difference between McClintock and the neo-Darwinians, “what meaning was then left to the notion of the gene as a fixed, unchanging unit of heredity? Central to neo-Darwinian theory was the premise that whatever genetic variation does occur is random, and McClintock reported genetic changes that are under the control of the organism. Such results just did not fit in the standard frame of analysis.”
In this biographical treatment of McClintock, though, it’s not clear whether this flexibility is within the genes themselves and what is meant by “under the control of the organism.” Keller writes that “Some mechanisms involved massive reorganization of the genome; others merely modulated the expression of genes without changing the DNA composition.” But either way, the “reason” for the flexibility lay outside of the genes themselves. Keller, referring to McClintock (“genes just had to be controlled.”), writes that something external to the gene, some organizational property in the cell itself, had to be included, which allows for variable genetic expression based on feedback and learning. “It is the overall organization, or orchestration, that enables the organism to meet its needs,” Keller writes of McClintock’s view of the organism.
This perspective made McClintock an outcaste among the neo-Darwinians. Keller tells this broader story as well, and it is striking how much disrespect can occur within a scientific dispute. Though Keller believes McClintock was not a good articulator of her perspective, she was for the most part a silent recipient of the negative criticism directed toward her.
Keller’s biographical writing is excellent, but her description of the science is technical and hard for a lay reader to follow. It’s almost as though Keller is writing two books for different audiences. Keller also writes about McClintock’s mystical approach to science. That part of the book seems overdone as one does not sense that McClintock’s appreciation for the full organism and her intuitive approach ever got in the way of solid scientific work.*
*She became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944
In this biographical treatment of McClintock, though, it’s not clear whether this flexibility is within the genes themselves and what is meant by “under the control of the organism.” Keller writes that “Some mechanisms involved massive reorganization of the genome; others merely modulated the expression of genes without changing the DNA composition.” But either way, the “reason” for the flexibility lay outside of the genes themselves. Keller, referring to McClintock (“genes just had to be controlled.”), writes that something external to the gene, some organizational property in the cell itself, had to be included, which allows for variable genetic expression based on feedback and learning. “It is the overall organization, or orchestration, that enables the organism to meet its needs,” Keller writes of McClintock’s view of the organism.
This perspective made McClintock an outcaste among the neo-Darwinians. Keller tells this broader story as well, and it is striking how much disrespect can occur within a scientific dispute. Though Keller believes McClintock was not a good articulator of her perspective, she was for the most part a silent recipient of the negative criticism directed toward her.
Keller’s biographical writing is excellent, but her description of the science is technical and hard for a lay reader to follow. It’s almost as though Keller is writing two books for different audiences. Keller also writes about McClintock’s mystical approach to science. That part of the book seems overdone as one does not sense that McClintock’s appreciation for the full organism and her intuitive approach ever got in the way of solid scientific work.*
*She became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944
April 30, 2025
Olha, uma oportunidade super interessante de conhecer Barbara McClintock. Costumo me divertir lendo biografias e essa entra na lista! Leitura tranquila, mesmo que algumas partes sejam bem puxadas pra uma área da qual quase nada sei (pra não dizer nada). Só sei que foi uma leitura super interessante mesmo! Eu particularmente gostei muito do capítulo 2 "A capacidade de estar sozinho". Quando bati o olho, logo pensei em Winnicott que foi citado brevemente no capítulo mesmo. Me deparei com uma Barbara criança que brincava sozinha mas de maneira plena e segura de si. Gostei muito de imaginar ela comendo morangos e se divertindo. Material super interessante, foi massa ver como Barbara se recusava a aceitar o lugar que reservavam às cientistas mulheres.
Muitos anos difíceis que ela passou e confesso que fiquei bem raivosa numas
partes em que a resistência dos cientistas era ENORME contra os estudos de Barbara. Cé loko, mas ela continuou firme e forte.
Antropologicamente falando, gostamos de estar no milharal, qual seja ele! Juntando com nossa força vital de envolvimento.
- O que permitiu a McClintock enxergar mais longe e mais profundamente nos mistérios da genética do que seus colegas?
A resposta dela é simples.
Repetidamente, McClintock nos diz que e necessário ter tempo para observar, paciência para "ouvir o que o material tem a dizer" e abertura para "deixar que ele venha até você". Acima de tudo, é necessário ter "um sentimento pelo organismo".
É preciso entender "como ele cresce, entender suas partes, perceber quando algo está errado com ele. [Um organismo] não é apenas um pedaço de plástico, é algo que está sendo constantemente afetado pelo ambiente, constantemente revelando atributos ou deficiências em seu crescimento. Você precisa estar atento a tudo isso... Você precisa conhecer essas plantas tão bem que, se qualquer coisa mudar, ...
você [possa] olhar para a planta e imediatamente saber a causa do dano que vê - algo que a arranhou, algo que a mordeu ou algo que o vento causou.
É necessário ter um sentimento por cada planta individualmente.
"Nenhuma planta é exatamente igual à outra. Todas são diferentes, e, como consequência, você precisa conhecer essas diferenças", ela explica. "Eu começo com a muda, e não quero deixá-la. Não sinto que realmente conheço a história se não acompanhar a planta ao longo de todo o seu desenvolvimento. Então eu conheço cada planta no campo. Conheço-as intimamente e considero um grande prazer conhecê-las!
Muitos anos difíceis que ela passou e confesso que fiquei bem raivosa numas
partes em que a resistência dos cientistas era ENORME contra os estudos de Barbara. Cé loko, mas ela continuou firme e forte.
Antropologicamente falando, gostamos de estar no milharal, qual seja ele! Juntando com nossa força vital de envolvimento.
- O que permitiu a McClintock enxergar mais longe e mais profundamente nos mistérios da genética do que seus colegas?
A resposta dela é simples.
Repetidamente, McClintock nos diz que e necessário ter tempo para observar, paciência para "ouvir o que o material tem a dizer" e abertura para "deixar que ele venha até você". Acima de tudo, é necessário ter "um sentimento pelo organismo".
É preciso entender "como ele cresce, entender suas partes, perceber quando algo está errado com ele. [Um organismo] não é apenas um pedaço de plástico, é algo que está sendo constantemente afetado pelo ambiente, constantemente revelando atributos ou deficiências em seu crescimento. Você precisa estar atento a tudo isso... Você precisa conhecer essas plantas tão bem que, se qualquer coisa mudar, ...
você [possa] olhar para a planta e imediatamente saber a causa do dano que vê - algo que a arranhou, algo que a mordeu ou algo que o vento causou.
É necessário ter um sentimento por cada planta individualmente.
"Nenhuma planta é exatamente igual à outra. Todas são diferentes, e, como consequência, você precisa conhecer essas diferenças", ela explica. "Eu começo com a muda, e não quero deixá-la. Não sinto que realmente conheço a história se não acompanhar a planta ao longo de todo o seu desenvolvimento. Então eu conheço cada planta no campo. Conheço-as intimamente e considero um grande prazer conhecê-las!
January 12, 2019
Barbara McClintock is such an inspiration!
January 31, 2025
Great biography of a singular scientist. Themes I enjoyed pondering: where do scientific breakthroughs come from? How does science treat minority opinions? How can we maintain diversity of thought, especially the “naturalist” mindset, in the molecular age?
Barbara McClintock seems to have had a unique approach to her work. She spent a lot of time with her study subject, maize, knowing each individual plant from seedling to adult. She spent long hours looking at their chromosomes under a microscope. She developed a sort of intuition about what she saw that allowed her to “know” things in a way seemingly outside of the scientific method. It’s clear that she feels this way about her process, but it was still challenging to understand as a reader.
The book interspersed McClintock’s life story with her science, plus a few chapters narrating the broader scientific landscape across the 1900s. McClintock was really at the center of the action! I imagine this context is most exciting to biologists. It was of course also fascinating to learn about the many obstacles she faced as a woman.
Overall a very inspiring read!
Barbara McClintock seems to have had a unique approach to her work. She spent a lot of time with her study subject, maize, knowing each individual plant from seedling to adult. She spent long hours looking at their chromosomes under a microscope. She developed a sort of intuition about what she saw that allowed her to “know” things in a way seemingly outside of the scientific method. It’s clear that she feels this way about her process, but it was still challenging to understand as a reader.
The book interspersed McClintock’s life story with her science, plus a few chapters narrating the broader scientific landscape across the 1900s. McClintock was really at the center of the action! I imagine this context is most exciting to biologists. It was of course also fascinating to learn about the many obstacles she faced as a woman.
Overall a very inspiring read!
August 8, 2023
I feel that much of the work is done because one wants to impose an answer on it. They have the answer ready, and they know what they want the material to tell them. If you'd only just let the material tell you.
January 14, 2026
Barbara McClintock is a badass maverick traiblazing bitchhhhhhhhhh and i put nothing but respect on her good good name this book made me wanna forgo earthly pleasures and forget my own first name and dedicate all my thoughts and energy and time to the lab (I will not be doing that)
July 16, 2020
Some of these reflections refer to experiences from my life but don't provide context for a broader audience. I am retaining them for my own memory of what this book means to me. They are more notes and less an integrated review. Read on at your own peril ;).
There's a three-category scheme for describing how people fit into their environments in Zen. McClintock and I are type 2's, which Dr. Ridgeway termed hopeful monsters.
There is a book on the sociology of surgical training from the 1970's called "Forgive and Remember." One resident is clearly struggling in a unique way. The afterward, written decades later, reveals that this resident was in fact a woman. The researcher had masked her sex in order to mask her identity because she was the only woman in the program. It seems he seriously regretted not recognizing her situation, and the compounded injustice his study had done to her. It is a kind of echo of the hostility of McClintock's intellectual environment.
It is shocking that institutional tolerance for "idiosyncracies" evolved to include sexual harassment and assault among favored members but not basically harmless behaviors among disfavored members. Understanding that underlying ethical calculus would be valuable. Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" suggests possibilites but still requires a repulsive disingenuousness - from a scientific standpoint - to enact.
What makes us tolerate discomfort versus rejecting it? Isn't discomfort required for learning? So why are so many scientists so intolerant of the discomfort that occurs in response to truly original thoughts?
The notion of authenticity is hard, and perhaps goes back to the person-types. Dolly Parton is an authentic person but perhaps not a maverick - a type 3, with protective coloration that has let her navigate an original career and an authentic path without drawing the censure or at least exclusion that McClintock did. (P. 85)
To what extent is helping learners find good environmental niches a task of teaching, mentoring, or sponsorship?
Learning is pretty great as a resilience strategy to address her mood disorder. Too bad there were so many obstacles. (P. 86)
What do you think Heidegger would have made of the difficulty of classifying McClintock and her work?
Science generally has difficulty balancing between those working "in the weeds" and those whose work is synthetic. And adhering to dogma in the face of contradictory evidence. But I have seen little teaching to help students become aware of, and try to guard against, this kind of fundamental hypocrasy in the pursuit of science. (P 96) Thomas Kuhn is in my queue. I should pull him out.
P.101 - the idea that details are keys to the larger whole made me think of fractals. This recurs on p. 200 - "'every component of the organism is as much of an organism as every other part"
P.103 because she had no opportunity for professional advancement, there were no resources for her to delegate, nor pressure to pursue other work, nor assistants to delegate work to. Those circumstances allowed her to develop unique expertise
P. 115 which scientists are beset by imposter syndrome? How does it impact their work?
P.117 reminds me of the idea of leaving attachment behind in Zen. You have to have attachment for a long time before transcending it. The getting out of the box is sudden and changes everything forever
Also "don't go against Nature." The ability to sense and ride along with Nature is a deep skill, required to achieve true knowledge and/or survival
P. 140 we don't talk enough about "growing pains" as a developmental experience of adulthood. Cycles of stagnation, isolation, even loss - are often periods of building. They hurt, and you don't have confidence that they are building anything until they do. And they are more painful often than the growing pains of adolescence because in adolescence you've never previously experienced competence, whereas in adulthood growing pains involve going from a position of relative competence to one of relative incompetence. And maybe having to break up some scar tissue from prior experiences. People need to learn to recognize that, to foster resilience through times of such disquiet
P.144 we place different responsibility in different arenas, too. Only a few people could read Einstein's general relativity. Mostly, those who couldn't read it didn't venture opinions. That is untrue in many other fields (including biology).
Mathematics is a language that people recognize they can't speak and don't hold the speaker responsible for their inability.
Non-mathematical languages operate differently and semantics are very hard for new abstract concepts.
But Aristotilean science does not accept social constructivism even though it practices it.
Dr. Ridgeway talked about the aesthetic education of becoming a physicist. All physicists agree on which equations are the simplest because their education teaches them to judge simplicity. It is unlike judging the beauty of a face, where disagreement is expected. The description of Feynman's slow acceptance shows the constructivism at work.
Part of the description of McClintock's approach evokes "Language in Thought and Action."
P.150 "But science and art alike make tougher demands on intersubjectivity: both are crucially dependent on internal visions, committed to conveying what the everyday eye cannot see."
P. 160 Dr. Ridgeway was at Cal Tech in the 1950's. I wonder if Delbrück was gone? Ridgeway generally disliked biology; I wish I had asked more about its intersection with physics. Pauling was his post-doc advisor and of course, Pauling studied the structure of hemoglobin in sickle cell disease, a paradigmatic single base pair genetic mutation. Ridgeway studied - for a while - something about bovine albumin, and then polymers.
P. 167 does the work of the Cold Spring Harbor group qualify as early convervengence science? It took them longer to integrate McClintock. But the physics/chem/bio/micro/genetics work is pretty astonishing.
P. 168 declaring a phenomenon "impossible" is generally scientific hubris.
P. 170 "With so many problems being so dramatically solved, who would want to attend to the problems that could not be solved--problems arising in the context of a biology that seemed more and more remote?"
Rilke's answer to the young poet seems apt: "I tell you that I have a long way to go before I am---where one begins... You are so young, so before all the beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Resolve to be always beginning---to be a beginner!"
P. 174 "polyphonic chorus" is a great metaphor for science
P. 179 "Trying to make everything fit into set dogma won't work... There is no such thing as a central dogma into which everything will fit. It turns out that any mechanism you can think of, you will find - even if it's the most bizarre kind of thinking. Anything... Even if it doesn't make much sense, it'll be there... So if the material tells you, 'it maybe this,' allow that. Don't turn it aside and call it an exception, an aberration, a contaminant... That's what happened all the way along the line with so many good clues."
P. 193-7 the zealotous aherence to scientific dogma is not a scientific position. Knowing and learning are in tension that we manage poorly. The Pascal quote is perfect: "There are two equally dangerous extremes - to shut reason out, and to let nothing else in." We need to understand the contours?? or domains of knowledge better: what are the assumptions of a theory? What variables does this system require? Does it intersect with that system? How are they integrated? Can we simultaneously value mechanism and function?
P.198 I believe Kvale's book on interviewing describes the emotional arc of a research project...
Kant's grave reads, "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." Some feeling of awe must accompany the deep kind of witnessing McClintock did.
Everyone that is quoted on science other than McClintock is a man.
P. 201 I love the idea thay "real understanding" does not come from the scientific method. That mysticism has a fundamental truth to it. It is close to DR's final unification project: I think he believed that physics (which also doesn't use scientific method) may come to have its variables unified, but that would not explain everything, because the set was too big. Close to McClintock's "[scientific method] gives us relationships which are useful, valid, and technically marvelous; however, they are not the truth."
P. 204 I wonder if Ridgeway absorbed any of Schroedinger's and Bohr's interest in the East, and it led him to karate. Although the distinction between theoretical and experimental physics us lost here...
There's a three-category scheme for describing how people fit into their environments in Zen. McClintock and I are type 2's, which Dr. Ridgeway termed hopeful monsters.
There is a book on the sociology of surgical training from the 1970's called "Forgive and Remember." One resident is clearly struggling in a unique way. The afterward, written decades later, reveals that this resident was in fact a woman. The researcher had masked her sex in order to mask her identity because she was the only woman in the program. It seems he seriously regretted not recognizing her situation, and the compounded injustice his study had done to her. It is a kind of echo of the hostility of McClintock's intellectual environment.
It is shocking that institutional tolerance for "idiosyncracies" evolved to include sexual harassment and assault among favored members but not basically harmless behaviors among disfavored members. Understanding that underlying ethical calculus would be valuable. Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" suggests possibilites but still requires a repulsive disingenuousness - from a scientific standpoint - to enact.
What makes us tolerate discomfort versus rejecting it? Isn't discomfort required for learning? So why are so many scientists so intolerant of the discomfort that occurs in response to truly original thoughts?
The notion of authenticity is hard, and perhaps goes back to the person-types. Dolly Parton is an authentic person but perhaps not a maverick - a type 3, with protective coloration that has let her navigate an original career and an authentic path without drawing the censure or at least exclusion that McClintock did. (P. 85)
To what extent is helping learners find good environmental niches a task of teaching, mentoring, or sponsorship?
Learning is pretty great as a resilience strategy to address her mood disorder. Too bad there were so many obstacles. (P. 86)
What do you think Heidegger would have made of the difficulty of classifying McClintock and her work?
Science generally has difficulty balancing between those working "in the weeds" and those whose work is synthetic. And adhering to dogma in the face of contradictory evidence. But I have seen little teaching to help students become aware of, and try to guard against, this kind of fundamental hypocrasy in the pursuit of science. (P 96) Thomas Kuhn is in my queue. I should pull him out.
P.101 - the idea that details are keys to the larger whole made me think of fractals. This recurs on p. 200 - "'every component of the organism is as much of an organism as every other part"
P.103 because she had no opportunity for professional advancement, there were no resources for her to delegate, nor pressure to pursue other work, nor assistants to delegate work to. Those circumstances allowed her to develop unique expertise
P. 115 which scientists are beset by imposter syndrome? How does it impact their work?
P.117 reminds me of the idea of leaving attachment behind in Zen. You have to have attachment for a long time before transcending it. The getting out of the box is sudden and changes everything forever
Also "don't go against Nature." The ability to sense and ride along with Nature is a deep skill, required to achieve true knowledge and/or survival
P. 140 we don't talk enough about "growing pains" as a developmental experience of adulthood. Cycles of stagnation, isolation, even loss - are often periods of building. They hurt, and you don't have confidence that they are building anything until they do. And they are more painful often than the growing pains of adolescence because in adolescence you've never previously experienced competence, whereas in adulthood growing pains involve going from a position of relative competence to one of relative incompetence. And maybe having to break up some scar tissue from prior experiences. People need to learn to recognize that, to foster resilience through times of such disquiet
P.144 we place different responsibility in different arenas, too. Only a few people could read Einstein's general relativity. Mostly, those who couldn't read it didn't venture opinions. That is untrue in many other fields (including biology).
Mathematics is a language that people recognize they can't speak and don't hold the speaker responsible for their inability.
Non-mathematical languages operate differently and semantics are very hard for new abstract concepts.
But Aristotilean science does not accept social constructivism even though it practices it.
Dr. Ridgeway talked about the aesthetic education of becoming a physicist. All physicists agree on which equations are the simplest because their education teaches them to judge simplicity. It is unlike judging the beauty of a face, where disagreement is expected. The description of Feynman's slow acceptance shows the constructivism at work.
Part of the description of McClintock's approach evokes "Language in Thought and Action."
P.150 "But science and art alike make tougher demands on intersubjectivity: both are crucially dependent on internal visions, committed to conveying what the everyday eye cannot see."
P. 160 Dr. Ridgeway was at Cal Tech in the 1950's. I wonder if Delbrück was gone? Ridgeway generally disliked biology; I wish I had asked more about its intersection with physics. Pauling was his post-doc advisor and of course, Pauling studied the structure of hemoglobin in sickle cell disease, a paradigmatic single base pair genetic mutation. Ridgeway studied - for a while - something about bovine albumin, and then polymers.
P. 167 does the work of the Cold Spring Harbor group qualify as early convervengence science? It took them longer to integrate McClintock. But the physics/chem/bio/micro/genetics work is pretty astonishing.
P. 168 declaring a phenomenon "impossible" is generally scientific hubris.
P. 170 "With so many problems being so dramatically solved, who would want to attend to the problems that could not be solved--problems arising in the context of a biology that seemed more and more remote?"
Rilke's answer to the young poet seems apt: "I tell you that I have a long way to go before I am---where one begins... You are so young, so before all the beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Resolve to be always beginning---to be a beginner!"
P. 174 "polyphonic chorus" is a great metaphor for science
P. 179 "Trying to make everything fit into set dogma won't work... There is no such thing as a central dogma into which everything will fit. It turns out that any mechanism you can think of, you will find - even if it's the most bizarre kind of thinking. Anything... Even if it doesn't make much sense, it'll be there... So if the material tells you, 'it maybe this,' allow that. Don't turn it aside and call it an exception, an aberration, a contaminant... That's what happened all the way along the line with so many good clues."
P. 193-7 the zealotous aherence to scientific dogma is not a scientific position. Knowing and learning are in tension that we manage poorly. The Pascal quote is perfect: "There are two equally dangerous extremes - to shut reason out, and to let nothing else in." We need to understand the contours?? or domains of knowledge better: what are the assumptions of a theory? What variables does this system require? Does it intersect with that system? How are they integrated? Can we simultaneously value mechanism and function?
P.198 I believe Kvale's book on interviewing describes the emotional arc of a research project...
Kant's grave reads, "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." Some feeling of awe must accompany the deep kind of witnessing McClintock did.
Everyone that is quoted on science other than McClintock is a man.
P. 201 I love the idea thay "real understanding" does not come from the scientific method. That mysticism has a fundamental truth to it. It is close to DR's final unification project: I think he believed that physics (which also doesn't use scientific method) may come to have its variables unified, but that would not explain everything, because the set was too big. Close to McClintock's "[scientific method] gives us relationships which are useful, valid, and technically marvelous; however, they are not the truth."
P. 204 I wonder if Ridgeway absorbed any of Schroedinger's and Bohr's interest in the East, and it led him to karate. Although the distinction between theoretical and experimental physics us lost here...
February 28, 2019
Keller’s biography of Barbara McClintock, A FEELING FOR THE ORGANISM, chronicles McClintock’s personal and professional life, describing an idiosyncratic and often-frustrated maize physiologist and geneticist who followed her intuition on the way to making foundational discoveries in the field of genetics. McClintock achieved prominence and recognition for her work on cytogenetics and genetic mapping in maize, including being elected to the National Academy of Sciences (the third woman to be so honored), though much of her work went underappreciated for years or decades and she was never awarded tenure as a professor. She was often frustrated by the lack of attention some of her most perplexing findings received and considered her status as a woman as part of the problem. Her descriptions of transposable elements went largely unacknowledged (or understood) until similar mechanisms were demonstrated in bacteria, at which point McClintock’s ideas were finally recognized as groundbreaking. Indeed, McClintock received the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 (the year this book was published) for her discovery of transposable elements, more than 30 years after her initial description of “controlling elements”. Since then she has become a darling of plant geneticists and women’s studies curricula, being celebrated as a pioneering visionary in her field and promoted as a woman scientist that persevered despite the blatant structural sexism of her time.
As a historical record A FEELING FOR THE ORGANISM does a good job of placing McClintock and her research in relation to world events, social norms, and scientific development. Fortunately for those not versed in the science, it does not go into great detail on the intricacies of plant genetics and those sections that do attempt explanation of the complex biology McClintock described are generally brief.
The degree to which McClintock was a victim of sexism and discrimination is the topic of ongoing debates, though for my part it seems that she has received at least the appropriate amount of recognition for her contributions and that her being a woman contributes to her legacy and fame in only a positive way. During her time at University of Missouri and Cornell University she unquestionably suffered from unequal treatment compared to her male counterparts, but who is discussing them now that the pendulum has swung the other way? Part of her career-related frustrations were also due to her personality, whom many apparently found off-putting, and which also contributed to her inability to effectively communicate the importance of some of her findings.
Another area of semi-controversy surrounding McClintock and her discoveries surrounds her insistence on using near-mystical-sounding language to explain her leaps of intuition. The title of this book refers to McClintock being led by feelings and intuition rather than pure logic and scientific theory. Many scientists not intimately familiar with McClintock found her explanations of how she just knew something or that the plants themselves told her something extremely off-putting. Today we would say she was led by her subconscious or just got lucky, but McClintock seems to have believed in some sort of higher power or mystical intuition. If anything this book probably overemphasizes McClintock’s mysticism and idiosyncrasies. Based on my conversations with many who knew her personally, she was loved and respected greatly. Regardless, her findings have contributed enormously to our ever-growing understanding of genomes, genes, and genetics and she has become a legend in her own right.
As a historical record A FEELING FOR THE ORGANISM does a good job of placing McClintock and her research in relation to world events, social norms, and scientific development. Fortunately for those not versed in the science, it does not go into great detail on the intricacies of plant genetics and those sections that do attempt explanation of the complex biology McClintock described are generally brief.
The degree to which McClintock was a victim of sexism and discrimination is the topic of ongoing debates, though for my part it seems that she has received at least the appropriate amount of recognition for her contributions and that her being a woman contributes to her legacy and fame in only a positive way. During her time at University of Missouri and Cornell University she unquestionably suffered from unequal treatment compared to her male counterparts, but who is discussing them now that the pendulum has swung the other way? Part of her career-related frustrations were also due to her personality, whom many apparently found off-putting, and which also contributed to her inability to effectively communicate the importance of some of her findings.
Another area of semi-controversy surrounding McClintock and her discoveries surrounds her insistence on using near-mystical-sounding language to explain her leaps of intuition. The title of this book refers to McClintock being led by feelings and intuition rather than pure logic and scientific theory. Many scientists not intimately familiar with McClintock found her explanations of how she just knew something or that the plants themselves told her something extremely off-putting. Today we would say she was led by her subconscious or just got lucky, but McClintock seems to have believed in some sort of higher power or mystical intuition. If anything this book probably overemphasizes McClintock’s mysticism and idiosyncrasies. Based on my conversations with many who knew her personally, she was loved and respected greatly. Regardless, her findings have contributed enormously to our ever-growing understanding of genomes, genes, and genetics and she has become a legend in her own right.
October 1, 2010
This book is an insightful journey into the life and work of an accomplished scientist, and does a great job of showing the challenges McClintock faced for being a radical thinker—one who explored her subject to a depth and with an intuition unlike that of any of her peers, and who explained her discoveries in such exhaustive detail that others had difficulty following it. McClintock's life and work spanned most of the 20th century. I vaguely recognized her discoveries from my college biology and genetics textbooks of the late 70s. Wow! As I neared the end of the book, I began to wonder why McClintock hadn't been awarded the Nobel Prize. A subsequent net search told me that she had, indeed, just as the book went to press; thus there was no mention of it. Fortunately, McClintock lived for several more years to enjoy the prize she so deserved. The book includes just enough of scientific information to make the biography come alive. I wish I could have known Barbara McClintock.
August 17, 2012
Barbara McClintock was a brilliant female scientist, unwilling to settle for a “woman’s job” teaching when she was clearly cut out for research. Her intelligence and insight eventually put her discoveries so far ahead of the rest of her field that it took decades for her to receive the recognition she deserved. In this biography, we learn about both her struggles as a women in science and the details of her Nobel prize winning research.
Read more here....
Read more here....
November 5, 2012
THE biography of Barbara McClintock, the geneticist who won the Nobel prize in 1983 at the age of 82, forty years after her pioneering chromosomal work on gene transportation, working with maize plants in Cold HArbor Labs, Long Island.
August 26, 2007
Will gave me this book for my 19th birthday and now I am a PhD student working in a Drosophila genetics lab.
Will's pretty canny.
Will's pretty canny.
February 28, 2008
Fantastic biography of Barbara McClintock, the discoverer of transposons.
June 16, 2012
What an amazing book and woman. Keller's treatment of her life is true to McClintock's science and her personality. Absolutely fabulous.
January 12, 2011
I really like learning about woman who overcome and make a name for themselves. Science is a difficult place for woman and she did a lot for biology!
Read
August 9, 2011...why it doesn't matter what conventional science thinks... you may be decades ahead...
Read
November 7, 2011This book is definitely for the scientific mind. It provides a look into the world of science.
April 10, 2010
this book literally changed my life. i'm reading it again :)
July 4, 2012
Great book.
Amazing scientist.
Amazing scientist.
October 7, 2020
A glowing 1983 overview of Barbara McClintock and her work, published right before McClintock won the 1983 Nobel Prize. Keller tries to bring out the ways in which gender was a problem for McClintock, although interestingly McClintock herself was resolute that she didn't consider herself a feminist (although no doubt personally aware of and opposed to gender-based discrimination).
It's a fantastic piece of History and Philosophy of Science, which can easily be used in conversation with Kuhn's account of how paradigms direct attention towards and away, the notion of incommensurability, and to think about the role of tacit knowledge in science. Importantly, all of these are seen as intelligible only against a dynamic social story, showing how far a solitary individual can go (and can't).
From the Preface:
It's a fantastic piece of History and Philosophy of Science, which can easily be used in conversation with Kuhn's account of how paradigms direct attention towards and away, the notion of incommensurability, and to think about the role of tacit knowledge in science. Importantly, all of these are seen as intelligible only against a dynamic social story, showing how far a solitary individual can go (and can't).
From the Preface:
"It might be tempting to read this history as a tale of dedication rewarded after years of neglect—of prejudice or indifter. ence eventually routed by courage and truth. But the actual story is both more complex and more illuminating. It is a story about the nature of scientific knowledge, and of the tangled web of individual and group dynamics that define its growth. A new idea, a new conception, is born in the privacy of one man's or one woman's dreams. But for that conception to become part of the body of scientific theory, it must be acknowledged by the society of which the individual is a member, in turn, the collective effort provides the ground out of which new ideas grow. Scientific knowledge as a whole grows out of the interaction—sometimes complex, always subtle—between individual creativity and communal validation. But sometimes that interaction miscarries, and an estrangement occurs between individual and community. Usually, in such a case, the scientist loses credibility. But should that not happen, or, even better, should it happen and then be reversed, we have a special opportunity to understand the meaning of dissent in science.
The story of Barbara McClintock allows us to explore the conditions under which dissent in science arises, the function it serves, and the plurality of values and goals it reflects. It makes us ask: What role do interests, individual and collective, play in the evolution of scientific knowledge? Do all scientists seek the same kinds of explanations? Are the kinds of questions they ask the same? Do differences in methodology between different subdisciplines even permit the same kinds of answers? And when significant differences do arise in questions asked, explanations sought, methodologies employed, how do they affect communication between scientists? In short, why could McClintock's discovery of transposition not be absorbed by her Contemporaries? We can say that her vision of biological organization was too remote from the kinds of explanations her colleagues were seeking, but we need to understand what that distance is composed of, and how such divergences develop.
Thomas S. Kuhn has reminded us that conversions in science (or resistances to conversion) occur "not despite the fact that scientists are human but because they are." He chooses to focus attention in the community and the dynamics by which the community forms and reforms itself. Our focus, by contrast, will be on the individual, on the "idiosyncracies of autobiogra-phy and personality" that incline an individual scientist to a particular set of methodological and philosophical commit-ments, to resisting or accepting the dominant trend within a field—but always against the background of the community. Of necessity, therefore, this book must serve simultaneously as biography and as intellectual history. Its starting point is the recognition that science is at once a highly personal and a communal endeavor." (xx-xxi)
September 3, 2017
This is a story of the interaction between an individual scientist, Barbara McClintock (1902--1992), and a science, genetics.[1] The book serves simultaneously as a biography and as an intellectual story. Evelyn Fox Keller shows how science is both highly personal and a communal endeavor.[2]
The role of observation in Barbara McClintock's experimental work provides the key to her understanding. What for others is interpretation, or speculation, is for her trained direct perception.[3] McClintock pushed her observational and cognitive skills so far that few could follow her.[4] She talked about the limits of verbally explicit reasoning and stressed the importance of having a "feeling for the organism." Her understanding emerged from a thorough absorption in, and even identification with, her material.[5]
The word "understanding," and the particular meaning Barbara McClintock attributed to it, is the cornerstone of her entire approach to science. For McClintock, the smallest details provided the keys to the larger whole. It was her conviction that the closer her focus, the greater her attention to the unique characteristics of a single plant, the more she could learn about the general principles by which the plant as a whole was organized.[6]
Over and over again, Barbara McClintock emphasized that one must have the time to look, the patience to "hear what the material has to say to you," the openness to "let it come to you." Above all, one must have "a feeling for the organism.". "No two plants are exactly alike. They're all different, and as a consequence, you have to know that difference," she explained. Both literally and figuratively, her "feeling for the organism" extended her vision.[7]
For Barbara McClintock, reason — at least in the conventional sense of the word — is not by itself adequate to describe the vast complexity of living forms. Organisms have a life and order of their own that scientists can only partially fathom. No models we invent can begin to do full justice to the prodigious capacity of organisms to devise means for guaranteeing their own survival. It is the overall organization, or orchestration, that enables the organism to meet its needs, whatever they might be, in ways that never cease to surprise us. That capacity for surprise gave McClintock immense pleasure.[8]
Our surprise is a measure of our tendency to underestimate the flexibility of living organisms. The adaptability of plants tends to be especially unappreciated. There is no question that plants have all kinds of sensitivities.[9] The ultimate descriptive task, for both artists and scientists, is to "ensoul" what one sees, to attribute to it the life one shares with it.[10] In short, one must have a "feeling for the organism."
Barbara McClintock had a holistic perspective and got a much deeper understanding than most scientists because she was interested in and got a "feeling for the whole organism." Barbara McClintock was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. I find her life and work most fascinating.
Notes:
[1] Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (W. H. Freeman and Company, 1982), p.ix.
[2] Ibid., p.xiii.
[3] Ibid., p.xiii.
[4] Ibid., pp.xiii--xiv.
[5] Ibid., p.xiv.
[6] Ibid., p.101.
[7] Ibid., p.198.
[8] Ibid., p.199.
[9] Ibid., p.199.
[10] Ibid., p.204.
The role of observation in Barbara McClintock's experimental work provides the key to her understanding. What for others is interpretation, or speculation, is for her trained direct perception.[3] McClintock pushed her observational and cognitive skills so far that few could follow her.[4] She talked about the limits of verbally explicit reasoning and stressed the importance of having a "feeling for the organism." Her understanding emerged from a thorough absorption in, and even identification with, her material.[5]
The word "understanding," and the particular meaning Barbara McClintock attributed to it, is the cornerstone of her entire approach to science. For McClintock, the smallest details provided the keys to the larger whole. It was her conviction that the closer her focus, the greater her attention to the unique characteristics of a single plant, the more she could learn about the general principles by which the plant as a whole was organized.[6]
Over and over again, Barbara McClintock emphasized that one must have the time to look, the patience to "hear what the material has to say to you," the openness to "let it come to you." Above all, one must have "a feeling for the organism.". "No two plants are exactly alike. They're all different, and as a consequence, you have to know that difference," she explained. Both literally and figuratively, her "feeling for the organism" extended her vision.[7]
For Barbara McClintock, reason — at least in the conventional sense of the word — is not by itself adequate to describe the vast complexity of living forms. Organisms have a life and order of their own that scientists can only partially fathom. No models we invent can begin to do full justice to the prodigious capacity of organisms to devise means for guaranteeing their own survival. It is the overall organization, or orchestration, that enables the organism to meet its needs, whatever they might be, in ways that never cease to surprise us. That capacity for surprise gave McClintock immense pleasure.[8]
Our surprise is a measure of our tendency to underestimate the flexibility of living organisms. The adaptability of plants tends to be especially unappreciated. There is no question that plants have all kinds of sensitivities.[9] The ultimate descriptive task, for both artists and scientists, is to "ensoul" what one sees, to attribute to it the life one shares with it.[10] In short, one must have a "feeling for the organism."
Barbara McClintock had a holistic perspective and got a much deeper understanding than most scientists because she was interested in and got a "feeling for the whole organism." Barbara McClintock was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. I find her life and work most fascinating.
Notes:
[1] Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (W. H. Freeman and Company, 1982), p.ix.
[2] Ibid., p.xiii.
[3] Ibid., p.xiii.
[4] Ibid., pp.xiii--xiv.
[5] Ibid., p.xiv.
[6] Ibid., p.101.
[7] Ibid., p.198.
[8] Ibid., p.199.
[9] Ibid., p.199.
[10] Ibid., p.204.
June 19, 2024
c 1983, 10th anniversary edition 1993
Keller: 'Five months after this book first appeared, Barbara McClintock was awarded the Nobel Prize....Nonetheless, I have decided to let this book stand as I initially wrote it.'
[McClintock was still living and working at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island till she died in 1992.]
McClintock, born 1902, was apparently a very very special person, who realized as a teenager that she had to choose between cultivating her intellect [following her own thinking] and conforming to society around her [school, teachers, classmates]. She consciously chose the former, and was forced to make the decision again and again throughout her career, i.e. the rest of her life.
Keller does a terrific job of helping us understand how McClintock saw her own life and work, and also how others saw her and her work. Parts of the book explain the basics of what was known about Genes and Chromosomes in the early 1900s and onward, and later what the structure of DNA and the new field of molecular genetics were/are. I am disappointed in myself that I was unable to absorb Keller's clear explanations of these [to me difficult] topics.
Never mind, Keller's convictions were strong, and unique to her, about how heredity [she studied Corn her entire career] works and something called Transposition -- which I had not heard of but is a theory McClintock is known for and that took decades for other scientists to understand and accept.
In early decades of her career, McClintock could not get a proper job because of being female. Later she did, but her personality grated on too many people; she was not willing to make a lot of concessions for people who couldn't follow her thinking and writing. She had a handful of loyal researchers who DID understand an value her work and her ideas.
Keller explains a lot of things about how science research works, and all the factors in how a new idea becomes accepted [or rejected] by 'the scientific community' -- which is not at all a homogeneous entity! These discussions/reflections of Keller's are useful in any age and in any branch of science.
A valuable book on many fronts. I of course love the descriptions of McClintock's interactions with other, that's always fascinating to me.
Keller: 'Five months after this book first appeared, Barbara McClintock was awarded the Nobel Prize....Nonetheless, I have decided to let this book stand as I initially wrote it.'
[McClintock was still living and working at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island till she died in 1992.]
McClintock, born 1902, was apparently a very very special person, who realized as a teenager that she had to choose between cultivating her intellect [following her own thinking] and conforming to society around her [school, teachers, classmates]. She consciously chose the former, and was forced to make the decision again and again throughout her career, i.e. the rest of her life.
Keller does a terrific job of helping us understand how McClintock saw her own life and work, and also how others saw her and her work. Parts of the book explain the basics of what was known about Genes and Chromosomes in the early 1900s and onward, and later what the structure of DNA and the new field of molecular genetics were/are. I am disappointed in myself that I was unable to absorb Keller's clear explanations of these [to me difficult] topics.
Never mind, Keller's convictions were strong, and unique to her, about how heredity [she studied Corn her entire career] works and something called Transposition -- which I had not heard of but is a theory McClintock is known for and that took decades for other scientists to understand and accept.
In early decades of her career, McClintock could not get a proper job because of being female. Later she did, but her personality grated on too many people; she was not willing to make a lot of concessions for people who couldn't follow her thinking and writing. She had a handful of loyal researchers who DID understand an value her work and her ideas.
Keller explains a lot of things about how science research works, and all the factors in how a new idea becomes accepted [or rejected] by 'the scientific community' -- which is not at all a homogeneous entity! These discussions/reflections of Keller's are useful in any age and in any branch of science.
A valuable book on many fronts. I of course love the descriptions of McClintock's interactions with other, that's always fascinating to me.
July 7, 2017
Barbara McClintock has been a role model of mine since high school, and reading this book has made her even more of a personal hero. Keller's biography started out fine but a little slow (covering McClintock's childhood and such), but once she began to discuss the molecular revolution in biology and set the stage for the discovery of transposable elements, I couldn't put the book down! This book even had me laughing out loud, such as when McClintock described fashion as "decorating the torso." McClintock's many and various contributions are well covered, and the chapters on the scientific background of the time are fascinating. Keller did a great job covering the paradigm shifts and the emergent role of women in science. Anyone interested in biology, gender and science, or philosophy of science should give this a read.
The author does a great job covering the various background conditions that contributed to McClintock's initial lack of recognition. She is able to masterfully integrate various elements of the scientific landscape of the time into one cohesive story that lends immense explanatory power to the events of McClintock's career-- being able to understand all of these contributing elements honestly felt like a "Eureka!" moment. Nowadays we know that genetics involves a great deal of complex regulation and interaction, so it's pretty shocking that the idea that DNA's coding was subject to influence was once considered borderline heretical. It was thrilling to uncover the backstory of the very scientific discoveries I have always learned about in class. This book has made me think that McClintock should really be credited with discovering genetic regulation itself, since she described such a system a full DECADE before the discovery of the Lac operon! It is because of McClintock that we now view genetic modulation and rearrangement as the *norm* instead of as isolated instances of faulty mechanisms in an otherwise cloistered genetic code.
Cheers to Barbara McClintock, a true free spirit who helped demystify genetics and whose scientific intuition and powers of observation were absolutely unparalleled.
The author does a great job covering the various background conditions that contributed to McClintock's initial lack of recognition. She is able to masterfully integrate various elements of the scientific landscape of the time into one cohesive story that lends immense explanatory power to the events of McClintock's career-- being able to understand all of these contributing elements honestly felt like a "Eureka!" moment. Nowadays we know that genetics involves a great deal of complex regulation and interaction, so it's pretty shocking that the idea that DNA's coding was subject to influence was once considered borderline heretical. It was thrilling to uncover the backstory of the very scientific discoveries I have always learned about in class. This book has made me think that McClintock should really be credited with discovering genetic regulation itself, since she described such a system a full DECADE before the discovery of the Lac operon! It is because of McClintock that we now view genetic modulation and rearrangement as the *norm* instead of as isolated instances of faulty mechanisms in an otherwise cloistered genetic code.
Cheers to Barbara McClintock, a true free spirit who helped demystify genetics and whose scientific intuition and powers of observation were absolutely unparalleled.
August 15, 2020
Really a nice book and a must-read for every biologist who plans on making an academic career. But I rather doubt, that any non-biologist can understand it.
Insights I got from this book:
1. For succes you need some senior scientist who promotes you, the latest during your master's degree. You can't become "great" simply because you're good. The science establishment must let you in.
2. Established scientist's "mental arteries harden with time" (p 178). Also known as the professor's bigotry.
3. Data doesn't speak for itself. You need to be a persuasive person (p 180).
4. "Good science cannot proceed without a deep emotional investment on part of the scientist." (p 198)
5. Models are not everything. And: Models maybe aren't the only way of science (p 201).
6. The "scientific method" is also greatly influenced by what is currently the prevailing opinion. (p 203)
7. Really truly great scientists might stay alone without relationship. (p 205) All the love they have goes into their research.
I would also recommend this book to people who are yet only planning on going to university. It shows the hardships to be faced. And that you needn't be mainly brilliant, but rather have a very strong psychologic constitution.
Insights I got from this book:
1. For succes you need some senior scientist who promotes you, the latest during your master's degree. You can't become "great" simply because you're good. The science establishment must let you in.
2. Established scientist's "mental arteries harden with time" (p 178). Also known as the professor's bigotry.
3. Data doesn't speak for itself. You need to be a persuasive person (p 180).
4. "Good science cannot proceed without a deep emotional investment on part of the scientist." (p 198)
5. Models are not everything. And: Models maybe aren't the only way of science (p 201).
6. The "scientific method" is also greatly influenced by what is currently the prevailing opinion. (p 203)
7. Really truly great scientists might stay alone without relationship. (p 205) All the love they have goes into their research.
I would also recommend this book to people who are yet only planning on going to university. It shows the hardships to be faced. And that you needn't be mainly brilliant, but rather have a very strong psychologic constitution.
September 28, 2022
Some of the science was super jargon-y, and the parts I appreciated most were about McClintock rather than her work.
McClintock says she loses her sense of self in her work. I think back to Caro: how, while looking through primary sources, he would lose track of time; or of McCullough, who says he works in his books more than he works on them. Masterpieces are labors of love, as I've seen over and over.
It's strikingly beautiful that four bases of DNA make twenty amino acids, which collide and join up perfectly to create life. It's almost unbelievable.
My favorite theme in the book was the role of ideology in science. We often hear that the difference between science and religion is that science is based on fact and religion is based on faith, but no -- for decades, McClintock pursued her research through intuition, through self-sustaining belief, not by provable facts she could explain to others. Newton once said he knew from the start how gravity worked, and all math did was allow him to explain it to others. What is that, if not faith?
McClintock says she loses her sense of self in her work. I think back to Caro: how, while looking through primary sources, he would lose track of time; or of McCullough, who says he works in his books more than he works on them. Masterpieces are labors of love, as I've seen over and over.
It's strikingly beautiful that four bases of DNA make twenty amino acids, which collide and join up perfectly to create life. It's almost unbelievable.
My favorite theme in the book was the role of ideology in science. We often hear that the difference between science and religion is that science is based on fact and religion is based on faith, but no -- for decades, McClintock pursued her research through intuition, through self-sustaining belief, not by provable facts she could explain to others. Newton once said he knew from the start how gravity worked, and all math did was allow him to explain it to others. What is that, if not faith?
February 6, 2021
An interesting read, despite some rough spots with the exact biological mechanisms described. A brilliant, independent thinker who triumphed despite the challenges of being a female, unconventional scientist in the 1920s and beyond. She "wasn't employable" as a scientist because of gender and wasn't employable as an associate/tenured professor because of gender. But that didn't stop her from continuing her life's work. And while her findings were ignored for decades, ultimately her work was acknowledged as correct. Remarkable story, remarkable person.
Written in 1983. I wish the author had included photos of the corn kernels to illustrate what was being described.
Written in 1983. I wish the author had included photos of the corn kernels to illustrate what was being described.
October 4, 2025
Picked a copy of this book in a used books store in Jimbocho, Tokyo. I studied Genetics during my Bachelor's where I first heard of Barbara McClintock, who, I must admit after taking a cytology class, was a remarkable person. Reading this book more or less confirmed it, and I was awestruck by how relatable she was. Currently doing my doctoral research on plants, albeit the simpler model plant Arabidopsis, I found it heartwarming that she felt similar feelings and went through similar experiences in her pursuit of knowledge. Good reading for any struggling plant biology doctoral student, this book was!
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