Deep within the hallowed halls of scientific discovery, where whispers of groundbreaking theories and paradigm-shifting experiments reverberate, there existed a tale that was both extraordinary and compelling. It was a story that defied convention, challenged the very fabric of scientific understanding, and it centered around a woman named Barbara McClintock.
Above is the beginning paragraph I get when I asked chatGPT to write a thriller about Barbara McClintock.
So, who is Barbara McClintock?
Born in 1902, Barbara McClintock became a plant geneticist after her PhD in Cornell.
She studied corn genetics, developed methods for studying changes in chromosomes during reproduction, demonstrated fundamental ideas such as recombination during meiosis, ring chromosomes, and the roles of the centromere and telomeres.
She also developed the first genetic map for corn, linking different regions of the chromosome to the physical traits of the plant.
She was one of the leaders in the field, and was wildly successful. Around the age of 40, she became a member of the National Academy of Sciences - back in the 1940s, a 40-year-old woman in the National Academy of Sciences was highly unusual to say the least.
Around the late 1940s, she made a discovery that completely destroyed her career. She observed perplex patterns of inheritance in corn, and the only plausible explanation she could come up with, was that genes were picking up and and moving around on the DNA, and that sounded totally nuts.
Her proposal of “transposable genetic elements” was ridiculed at the time - this was before all the molecular genetic tools were available, and the idea that genes were mobile sounded pretty wacky. People soon jokingly referred to these as “jumping genes”.
The general consensus was Barbara McClintock had gone out of her mind.
Barbara McClintock, with a stoic personality and solid integrity, chose to trust her data and stood her ground. Ostracized by the mainstream scientific community, she stopped publishing and lecturing after 1953, essentially disappearing from the public view.
McClintock did not stop her research though - she kept working on her beloved corns by herself for decades afterwards, sharing unpublished papers that seemed confusing to most people. She was a lonely figure, misunderstood and unappreciated.
But little did the world know that within those papers lay the keys to unlocking a new understanding of the genetic world. (okay this is another dramatic sentence from ChatGPT but I love it)
As time marched on, in the 1980s molecular techniques finally caught up to show that she was absolutely right. The “jumping genes” - originally the mockery terms, were proven to be real, and later called “transposons”. Suddenly Barbara McClintock became a scientific celebrity. The world went crazy for her, and she got her Nobel prize in her late 80s.
McClintock, staying true to her stoic nature, said something like she simply reported what she had seen in corns, and she was never felt the necessity to win the arguments, and basically she just loved her work and wanted to go back to it. She continued working until about a week before her death at the age of 90.
To sum up this inspiring page of science history, Barbara McClintock discovered jumping genes on her own and staked her career on it. Most people people thought she was out of her mind, and she was vindicated 35 years later - 35 years! that’s more time than I have existed on earth.
Till this day, she remains the only woman to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine by herself, without sharing it with anyone.
Barbara McClintock in Cold Spring Harbor, 1951, continuing her research on corn genetics after the field had rejected her theory of jumping genes.
Why are genes jumping?
As molecular genetics dug deeper into the business of transposons, aka jumping genes, people realized plants moved genes around as a survival strategy.
Plants can encounter tough times (cellular stress) such as diseases or climate changes. Unlike us boring animals, plants can’t run away from their problems - and btw some of us are REALLY good at running away from life’s problems.
Plants have to come up with some fancy genetic tricks when facing adversity, they would move genes around (sometimes make a copy of a gene and stick it somewhere) - shuffle the cards, juggle the genes, in hope of stumbling upon some new combinations/ configurations that offer them advantages to survive the difficult situation.
Later people found out that animals such as vertebrates and mammals also have transposons - in fact about half of our genomes are transposable elements.
These elements were initially found in the immune system. When the world encounters a brand new pathogen (maybe a certain corona virus we all know too well by now) that no immune system has seen before, people get sick and miserable - then incredibly, as they recover, we’d find that their bodies have generated antibodies against these completely novel invaders.
When facing brand new intruders, our immune system would also do the jumping gene business - it splices up genes relevant to making antibodies and juggles them around. The immune systems would make a gazillion combinations of new antibodies and the body has a remarkable filtering process to select good candidates against the new pathogen that just showed up.
Words from Barbara McClintock
I was just so interested in what I was doing, I could hardly wait to get up in the morning and get at it.
One of my friends, a geneticist, said I was a child, because only children can’t wait to get up in the morning to get at what they want to do.
If you know you are on the right track, if you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off. No matter what they say.
The (Nobel) prize is such an extraordinary honor. It might seem unfair, however, to reward a person for having so much pleasure over the years, asking the maize plant to solve specific problems and then watching its responses.
Over the many years, I truly enjoyed not being required to defend my interpretations. I could just work with the greatest of pleasure. I never felt the need nor the desire to defend my vies. If I turned out to be wrong, I just forgot that I ever held such a view. It didn’t matter.
While there’s a certain charm to the whole “getting wronged by the world and vindicated later” narrative - we love the “comeback” story arc, the heroine herself might not see it that way, which might be part of the reason she was able to pull it off - maybe she was able to wait for 35 years because she did not think about the public opinion much, she was simply focused on her science.
The mainstream mocking part of the story reminds me of Lex’s interview with OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman (which I highly recommend). Sam Altman talked about when the company first announced they were working on AGI (artificial general intelligence) back in 2015, they were attacked and mocked and ridiculed by some eminent AI researchers, “people think we are batshit insane”.
Fast forward 7 years, Sam says “We don’t get mocked as much now”.
Going against the mass majority is scary, which is why it’s so beautiful to see people sticking to their guns and holding their ground.
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said:
All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
The next time you gaze upon a field of corn, maybe take a moment to remember Barbara McClintock, the brilliant scientist who unlocked the secrets of jumping genes.