Today is Ada Lovelace day, which means its time to celebrate women in technology and science! If you have the time, consider writing a blog or facebook post about a woman who has inspired you. Otherwise, feel free to browse the posts at Finding Ada and learn more about the women who've advanced our knowledge of the world. You can start with my post below, about pioneering cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock.


When Barbara McClintock first started studying corn, most people believed that genetic information was passed down pretty much unchanged from generation to generation. Sure, there was some swapping going on during meiosis - a process that was only hypothesized until McClintock and her graduate student Harriet Creighton proved its existence in 1931 - but one's genetic code, people believed, was pretty stable. Throughout her career, McClintock conducted ground-breaking research on just how unstable our chromosomes are.

At the University of Missouri, she studied the effects of radiation-induced mutation on corn chromosomes. She found that during mitosis, when cells make copies of their chromosomes, spontaneous breaking and rejoining occurred, leading to a wide variety of mutations, a process that is still a focus of cancer research today. She also found that irradiated corn chromosomes frequently formed rings. Ring chromosomes have since been found to be associated with a number of disorders, including mental retardation and epilepsy.

McClintock believed that chromosomes formed rings when radiation caused the loss of naturally-occuring, stabilizing sequences at the ends of the chromosomes. She decided to leave the University of Missouri, where she felt unwelcome and where she had been warned that if she got married, she would be fired, to pursue this research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

At Cold Spring Harbor, McClintock discovered the existence of "controlling elements", segments of the chromosome which influenced where breakage was most likely to occur. Further research showed that these elements also controlled what genes were active and which were suppressed, a fantastic breakthrough which she rightly predicted would help explain how cells with identical genes could find different expressions. Although this work would later win her a Nobel Prize, when she first started publishing about it in the early 1950s, she met with great resistance. As she later wrote in a letter to a colleague:

"I stopped publishing detailed reports long ago when I realized, and acutely, the extent of the disinterest and lack of confidence in the conclusions I was drawing from the studies. With the literature filled to the exhaustion of all of us, I decided it was useless to add weight to the biologist's wastebasket... all of the above is not intended as a complaint. Rather... I wish you to know how much I have appreciated your careful consideration and your thoughtful comprehension of the subtance of these summaries. Such comprehension has been rare indeed."

With so little support for her ideas, McClintock turned to studying the evolution and history of corn, a far less controversial topic. She retired in 1967 but continued to work on a fairly regular basis with students and colleagues. In 1983 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for her work on genetic regulation. Despite this honor, many argue that she still does not get the recognition she deserves. With her many breakthroughs and profound influence on fields as diverse as ethnobotany and oncology, she can be considered one of the greatest geneticists of all time.


(Sources: NIH Profiles, Wikipedia, Woods Hole Biological Laboratory, National Women's History Mueseum)