Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [79]
There is still great controversy over whether McClintock was wronged by her colleagues. Some historians of science have suggested that she was a woman in a man’s world, and that the rejection of her ideas was sexist in origin. Others say that the evidence simply wasn’t compelling enough for such radical conclusions to be drawn. Judging by a letter she wrote in 1973, McClintock felt that she was simply ahead of her time: ‘This became painfully evident to me in my attempts during the 1950s to convince geneticists that the action of genes had to be and was controlled … One must await the right time for conceptual change.’ Another letter to a colleague, written the same year, betrays more anger: ‘I stopped publishing detailed reports long ago when I realized, and acutely, the extent of disinterest and lack of confidence in the conclusions I was drawing.’
It is interesting that decades passed before McClintock began to comment on the reception her work had received. At the time, it was simply a delicious reprieve – it meant she was left alone.
The Nobel Prize-winning biologist Albert Szent-Györgyi, the discoverer of vitamin C, seems to have understood the independent streak that runs through science. ‘The real scientist … is ready to bear privation and, if need be, starvation rather than let anyone dictate to him which direction his work must take,’ he said. But make no mistake, he pointed out, this is not a selfless pursuit of truth, but a selfish one: ‘Research uses real egotists who seek their own pleasure and satisfaction, but find it in solving the puzzles of nature.’ Szent-Györgyi could have been writing about Barbara McClintock.
McClintock joined the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory because it offered her a ‘policy of no interference and complete freedom’. ‘I just go my own pace here,’ she said, ‘with no obligations other than that which my conscience dictates.’ We can see her egotism in her disregard for informing anyone else about her work. ‘I decided it was useless to add weight to the biologist’s wastebasket,’ she wrote in a letter to a fellow geneticist in 1973. ‘Instead, I decided to use the added time to enlarge experiments and thus increase my comprehensions of the basic phenomena.’
This approach freed her from the criticisms of colleagues, and let her set her own research agenda and make her own corrections. She said in 1983:
Over the many years, I truly enjoyed not being required to defend my interpretations. I could just work with the greatest of pleasure. I never felt the need nor the desire to defend my views. If I turned out to be wrong, I just forgot that I ever held such a view. It didn’t matter.
McClintock, it seems, was not in science for recognition: her reward was the private satisfaction of the puzzle-solver. She was in science simply because she wanted to know – for herself. In fact, we get no sense from her writings that she felt particularly slighted when, in 1965, the French geneticists François Jacob, André Lwoff and Jacques Monod won their Nobel Prize; in 1960, the trio had shown that genes for building body parts were flanked by genes for regulating them.
Others, though, were offended on McClintock’s behalf. In 1967, when she was awarded a National Academy of Sciences Kimber Medal, the citation pointed out that McClintock’s work was the precursor to the Nobel laureates’ work, and that ‘their thinking was probably much influenced by Barbara’s notion’.
Suddenly – and probably, to McClintock, annoyingly – she was back in vogue. Transposition was fingered in antibiotic resistance, cancer and immunology. It was universal in nature, not just a quirk of maize. In 1981 McClintock was, in the words of one of her biographers, ‘besieged with awards’: five prestigious prizes came her way. Two years later, in 1983, she was in Stockholm wondering what to say in her Nobel acceptance speech.
Before the award ceremony, Nobel laureates stay in Stockholm’s Grand Hotel. Its views across the waterfront to the magnificent