Summary
Barbara McClintock’s work on the genetics of corn won her a Nobel prize in 1983. Her research on jumping genes challenged the over-simplified picture of chromosomes and DNA that Watson and Crick’s discovery has all too often been used to support. During the half century that she worked at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory she became something of a living legend, a pioneer in a time when women weren’t expected to take much interest in science. In that story, she made a profound discovery that her male colleagues dismissed for years, leaving her out in the cold until they finally realized that it was true and granted her a belated Nobel Prize. Philip Ball tells the story of Barbara McLintock's life and work, from her early preference for sports, for solitude, and for intellectual life, that disturbed her parents, to her meticulous research on corn. In conversation with her recent biographer, Dr Nathaniel Comfort of Johns Hopkins University, he explores the facts and the fictions that grew up around her. Philip Ball talks about the legacy of her discovery of jumping genes with Professor Greg Hannon of the Cancer Research UK Institute at Cambridge University, who spent 25 years working in the McLintock Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor.
Picture Corn Cobs, Credit: Philippe Huguen/AFP/GettyImages)
Transcript
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| 0:55.0 | Hello and welcome to Discovery from the BBC World Service. I'm Philip Ball. In the late 1940s there was a rather special cornfield on Long Island. |
| 1:17.0 | It was growing in the grounds of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a private institution for biological research. |
| 1:25.0 | A group of students used to play baseball next to this field, and among them was a brash |
| 1:30.0 | young graduate named James Watson, who would soon revolutionize the science of genetics |
| 1:36.2 | by discovering the double helix structure of DNA. |
| 1:40.4 | If the ball went into the corn, Watson said, a woman would come out and harangue the students. |
| 1:46.0 | It was like being told off by your mother, he said. |
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