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.

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