Barbara McClintock - Honors and Recognition

Honors and Recognition

McClintock was awarded the National Medal of Science by Richard Nixon in 1970. Cold Spring Harbor named a building in her honor in 1973. In 1981, she became the first recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Grant, and was awarded the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, the Wolf Prize in Medicine and the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal by the Genetics Society of America. In 1982, she was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University for her research in the "evolution of genetic information and the control of its expression." Most notably, she received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1983, credited by the Nobel Foundation for discovering "mobile genetic elements", over thirty years after she initially described the phenomenon of controlling elements. She was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1989. McClintock received the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences of the American Philosophical Society in 1993.

She was awarded 14 Honorary Doctor of Science degrees and an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters. In 1986 she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. During her final years, McClintock led a more public life, especially after Evelyn Fox Keller's 1983 book A feeling for the organism brought McClintock's story to the public. She remained a regular presence in the Cold Spring Harbor community, and gave talks on mobile genetic elements and the history of genetics research for the benefit of junior scientists. An anthology of her 43 publications The discovery and characterization of transposable elements: the collected papers of Barbara McClintock was published in 1987. McClintock died in Huntington, New York, on 2 September 1992 at the age of 90; she never married or had children.