Barbara McClintock - Cold Spring Harbor

Cold Spring Harbor

After her year-long temporary appointment, McClintock accepted a full-time research position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Here, she was highly productive and continued her work with the breakage-fusion-bridge cycle, using it to substitute for X-rays as a tool for mapping new genes. In 1944, in recognition of her prominence in the field of genetics during this period, McClintock was elected to the National Academy of Sciences—only the third woman to be elected. In 1945, she became the first woman president of the Genetics Society of America. In 1944 she undertook a cytogenetic analysis of Neurospora crassa at the suggestion of George Beadle, who had used the fungus to demonstrate the one gene–one enzyme relationship. He invited her to Stanford to undertake the study. She successfully described the number of chromosomes, or karyotype, of N. crassa and described the entire life cycle of the species. N. crassa has since become a model species for classical genetic analysis.

Read more about this topic:  Barbara McClintock

Famous quotes containing the words cold, spring and/or harbor:

    Professor: War is hell, Mr. Thornhill, even if it’s just a cold one.
    Roger Thornhill: If you fellows can’t lick the Vandamms of this world without asking girls like her to bed down with them, and fly away with them, and probably never come back, perhaps you ought to start learning how to lose a few cold wars.
    Professor: I’m afraid we’re already doing that.
    Ernest Lehman (b.1920)

    Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but still remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.
    Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt (1767–1835)

    It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)