Barbara McClintock - Legacy

Legacy

Since her death, McClintock has been the subject of the biographical work by science historian Nathaniel C. Comfort, in The tangled field : Barbara McClintock's search for the patterns of genetic control. Comfort's biography contests some claims about McClintock, described as the "McClintock Myth", which he claims was perpetuated by the earlier biography by Keller. Keller's thesis was that McClintock was long ignored because she was a woman working in the sciences. (McClintock was also sometimes met with derision because she was a woman working in the sciences. For example, when McClintock presented her findings that the genetics of maize didn't conform to Mendelian distributions, geneticist Sewall Wright expressed the belief that she did not understand the underlying mathematics of her work, a belief he had expressed towards other women at the time. In addition, geneticist Lotte Auerbach recounted that Joshua Lederberg returned from a visit to McClintock's lab with the remark: 'By God, that woman is either crazy or a genius.' "As Auerbach tells it, McClintock had thrown Lederberg and his colleagues out after half an hour 'because of their arrogance. She was intolerant of arrogance....She felt she had crossed a desert alone and no one had followed her.'" However, Comfort asserts that McClintock was well regarded by her professional peers, even in the early years of her career. Although Comfort argues that McClintock was not a victim of gender discrimination, she has been widely written about in the context of women's studies, and most recent biographical works on women in science feature accounts of her experience. She is held up as a role model for girls in such works of children's literature as Edith Hope Fine's Barbara McClintock, Nobel Prize geneticist, Deborah Heiligman's Barbara McClintock: alone in her field and Mary Kittredge's Barbara McClintock. A recent biography for young adults by Naomi Pasachoff, Barbara McClintock, Genius of Genetics, provides a new perspective, based on the current literature.

On 4 May 2005, the United States Postal Service issued the "American Scientists" commemorative postage stamp series, a set of four 37-cent self-adhesive stamps in several configurations. The scientists depicted were Barbara McClintock, John von Neumann, Josiah Willard Gibbs, and Richard Feynman. McClintock was also featured in a 1989 four-stamp issue from Sweden which illustrated the work of eight Nobel Prize-winning geneticists. A small building at Cornell University and a laboratory building at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory bear her name to this day. A street has been named after her in the new "Adlershof Development Society" science park in Berlin

The 2011 novel The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides, features a character named Diane Macgregor, whose career, research and Nobel Prize award all reflect McClintock's.