Odd People
Barbara McClintock
When no one listened, she simply stopped talking
Her 1951 talk was met with silence. Instead of arguing she stopped publishing and went back to the corn field for twenty years.
Her material was maize. She tracked patterns of colour across the kernels through generation after generation. With no way to label a gene, the colour of a kernel was the label.
And she saw patterns that would not resolve. The places where colour appeared moved from generation to generation — inexplicable unless genes were changing position on the chromosome.
She presented the results at the 1951 Cold Spring Harbor symposium. There was no rebuttal and no argument. There was simply no response. She later recalled that the audience had not understood her, and that some of them concluded she had gone odd.
She gave up persuading. After 1953 she stopped publishing on the subject and kept doing the experiments. The data kept accumulating, unannounced.
- 1951Presentation — no response
- 1953Stops publishing. Keeps experimenting
- 1960sMobile genetic elements begin turning up in bacteria
- 1970sMolecular techniques confirm what those elements are
- 1983Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, unshared
What made her right was not argument but technique from other fields. Only once the same phenomenon appeared in bacteria and at the molecular level did anyone go back and read the corn-field notebooks.
The question that remainsIf a correct answer sat in a drawer doing nothing for twenty years — what was science doing during those twenty years?