biography of Barbara McClintock, A FEELING FOR THE ORGANISM, chronicles McClintocks personal and professional life, describing an idiosyncratic and oftenfrustrated 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 McClintocks ideas were finally recognized as groundbreaking.
Indeed, McClintock received the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine inthe year this book was published for her discovery of transposable elements, more thanyears after her initial description of “controlling elements”.
Since then she has become a darling of plant geneticists and womens 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 careerrelated frustrations were also due to her personality, whom many apparently found offputting, and which also contributed to her inability to effectively communicate the importance of some of her findings.
Another area of semicontroversy surrounding McClintock and her discoveries surrounds her insistence on using nearmysticalsounding 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 offputting.
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 McClintocks 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 evergrowing understanding of genomes, genes, and genetics and she has become a legend in her own right.
this book literally changed my life, i'm reading it again : A biography of the Nobel Prizewinning scientist explains her work in genetics and traces her long unheralded career as a research scientist.
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! Great book.
Amazing scientist. A glowingoverview of Barbara McClintock and her work, published right before McClintock won theNobel 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 genderbased 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 might be tempting to read this history as a tale of dedication rewarded after years of neglectof prejudice or indifter.Some of the science was super jargony, and the parts I appreciated most were about McClintock rather than her work.
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 interactionsometimes complex, always subtlebetween 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 autobiography and personality" that incline an individual scientist to a particular set of methodological and philosophical commitments, to resisting or accepting the dominant trend within a fieldbut 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.
" xxxxi
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 selfsustaining 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 For Ada Lovelace day this year, I decided to read a book about a female scientist with whom I wasn't familiar.
After some searchinin which I discovered that nearly every book I could find about Maria Mitchell, the first prominent female astronomer was for kidsI settled on Barbara McClintock, a pioneering geneticist and cytologist who worked from thes into thes.
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 Bioknowledge, but were ultimately decipherable, The book does leave a few questions for me in its age: having been published in, it doesn't cover the continuing influence of her work in the succeedingyears.
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 thes.
She discovered transposition in maize in thes, 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 lates and later.
Inshe 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, 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.
.