Barbara McClintock
What if genes don't stay put?
That time, that place
McClintock grew maize, recording the color and markings of individual kernels generation after generation.
Maize kernels sometimes come out mottled — color missing where it should be, or patchy within a single kernel. Mostly this was treated as noise.
Why this question
She saw the mottling was not random. It followed rules.
After long tracking she concluded: something moves next to the gene that makes color and switches it off, and switches it back on when it moves away. Which is to say that genetic elements change position on the chromosome.
What was found
She published in 1951.
The response was silence. Genes at the time were beads fixed at their places along the thread of a chromosome. That they wander was outside the pale.
She stopped publishing. No more papers, no more talks — back to her maize field, continuing alone. For more than twenty years.
In the 1970s, mobile genetic elements turned up in bacteria and then elsewhere, and she was confirmed.
In 1983, at eighty-one, she received an unshared Nobel Prize.
Genes were fixed at their appointed places on the chromosome
Mottling in maize kernels recurring by rule across generations
She later recalled that people thought her odd, and said that because of it no one interfered and she could work as she liked