Jumpin Genes

Year of Discovery: 1950

What Is It? Genes are not permanently fixed on chromosomes, but can jump
from position to position.
Who Discovered It? Barbara McClintock

Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?

Every researcher in the world accepted that genes were strung along chromosomes in
fixed positions like pearls on a necklace. Working alone in a small, windswept cornfield at
Cold Springs Harbor, Long Island, Barbara McClintock proved every other genetic scientist in the world wrong.
Carefully studying wild corn, Barbara McClintock found that genes not only can
jump, but regularly do jump from one position to another on a chromosome. She found that
a few controlling genes direct these jumping messenger genes to shift position and turn on,
or turn off, the genes next to them in their new location.
Barbara McClintocks work became the building block for a dozen major medical and
disease-fighting breakthroughs. The 1983 Nobel Prize Committee called Barbara
McClintocks pioneering work one of the two great discoveries of our time in genetics.

How Was It Discovered?

With a Ph.D. in genetics, Barbara McClintock lived in a trim two-room apartment over the
bright-green-painted garage of the Carnegie Institutes Cold Spring Harbor Research Facility.
A small, slight woman, Barbara stood barely five feet tall and weighed less than 90
pounds. Her face and hands were worn and wrinkled from long exposure to wind and sun.
Cold Spring Harbor is an isolated spot on northeastern Long Island characterized by
wind, rolling sand dunes, and waving shore grass. Stooping in a small half-acre cornfield
tucked between the facilitys cluster of buildings and the choppy waters of the Long Island
Sound, Barbara planted corn seeds by hand one-by-one in carefully laid out rows.
The year 1950 was Barbaras sixth year of planting, growing, and studying the genes
of these corn plants as they passed from generation to generation. She often felt more like a
farmer than a genetics researcher.
How Barbara spent her days depended on the season. In summer, most of her time was
spent in the cornfield, nurturing the plants that would produce her data for the year, weeding, checking for pests and disease that could ruin her experiments. In the fall she harvested
each ear by hand, carefully labeled it, and began her lab analysis of each genes location and

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structure on the chromosomes of each ear. Her lab consisted of one powerful microscope,
chemical lab trays, and stacks of journals to record her findings. This work consumed the
long hours of winter.
In the spring she split her time between numerical analysis of the previous years data
and field planning and preparation for the next generation of corn plants.
She carefully tracked color mutations, patterns, and changes year after year and discovered that genes are not fixed along chromosomes as everyone thought. Genes could
move. They did move. Some genes seemed able to direct other genes, telling them where to
go and when to act. These genetic directors controlled the movement and action of other
genes that jumped positions on command and then turned onor turned offthe genes
next to them in their new location.
It sounded like scientific heresy. It contradicted every genetics textbook, every genetics research paper, and the best minds and most advanced research equipment on Earth. At
the end of the 1950 harvest season Barbara debated about releasing her results and finally
decided to wait for one more years data.
McClintock presented her research at the 1951 national symposium on genetic research.
Her room had seats for 200. Thirty attended. A few more straggled in during her talk.
She was not asked a single question. Those few left in the room when she finished simply stood up and left.
As so often happens with radically new ideas, Barbara McClintock was simply dismissed by the audience with a bored and indifferent shrug. She was ignored. They couldnt
understand the implications of what she said.
Feeling both helpless and frustrated, Barbara returned to harvest her cornfield and start
her analysis of the seventh years crop.
It took another 25 years for the scientific community to understand the importance of
her discovery.
Fun Facts: Barbara McClintock became the first woman to receive an
unshared Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. When she died in 1992,
one of her obituaries suggested that she might well be ranked as the greatest figure in biology in the twentieth century.

More to Explore
Dash, Joan. The Triumph of Discovery. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1991.
Heiligman, Deborah. Barbara McClintock: Alone in Her Field. New York: W. H.
Freeman, 1998.
Keller, Evelyn. A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara
McClintock. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1993.
Maranto, Gina. At Long LastA Nobel for a Loner. Discover (December 1983): 26.
Opfell, Olga. The Lady Laureates: Women Who Have Won the Nobel Prize. Metuchen,
NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993.
Shields, Barbara. Winners: Women and the Nobel Prize. Minneapolis, MN: Dillon
Press, 1999.