Barbara McClintock
Barbara McClintock was born in 1902 in Hartford, CT and died in 1992. She was an American Geneticist who went as far as to win a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 for her discovery of genetic transpositions, making her the first American women to win an unshared Nobel. Barbara wrote papers from 1927 to 1991 only a year before she died and now those papers, lab notes, unpublished manuscripts, photographs, charts, and other helpful material, are stored in The American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. In 1944 Barbara became the third woman elected to the National Academy. She worked hard and obtained her undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture. She was supported by a fellowship from the National Research Council from 1931 – 1933 and then from 1941 until her death she worked at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Among the many honors awarded she got was the National Medal of Science, the US government's highest science award, which she received in 1970.
In the 1940s and 1950s Barbara work on the cytogenetics of maize led her to theorize that genes are transposable, they can move around, on the and between chromosomes. She observed the changing patterns of coloration in maize kernels over generations of controlled crosses and that is how she drew this inference. The idea that genes were movable didn’t seem to fit with what was known of them at the time, but in the late 1970s and early 1980s after improvements in the molecular techniques, others scientists were able to confirm her discovery.
Cytogenetics is a branch of genetics that is concerned with the study of chromosomes (ßorganized structures of DNA and proteins that are found in cells) and cell division. Cytogenetics is the related disease states caused by numerical and structural chromosome abnormalities. Tissue from your body is used to do these tests.