Barbara McClintock

For the illustrator named Barbara McClintock see Barbara McClintock (illustrator).

Honors and recognition

She was awarded the National Medal of Science by Richard Nixon in 1971. 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 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", nearly 40 years after she initially described the phenomenon of controlling elements.

Related Topics:
National Medal of Science - Richard Nixon - 1971 - MacArthur Foundation Grant - Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research - Wolf Prize in Medicine - Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize - Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine - Nobel Foundation

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She was awarded 14 Honorary Doctor of Science degrees, and one 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. McClintock died near Cold Spring Harbor, in Huntington, New York on September 2, 1992, at the age of 90, she never married or had children.

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Since her death she has been the subject of the autobiographical work by Nathaniel C. Comfort, The Tangled Field : Barbara McClintock's Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control. In 2005 the United States Postal Service released a postage stamp featuring McClintock as one in a series of a series of four American scientists regarded as the some of the greatest scientists of our time.

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