Informative Essay On Barbara Mcclintock

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The person I was assigned to research was a scientist by the name of Barbara Mcclintock. She was well known for her studies in Cytogenetics and has made several important discoveries. I found lots of helpful and interesting information about her that I am happy to share with you. I hope you learn a lot about Barbara Mcclintock.

Barbara was born in Hartford, Connecticut on June 16, 1902. She was the daughter of Sarah Mcclintock and Thomas Henry Mcclintock and had four siblings. As a child Barbara was very interested in learning and wanted to go to college. She was almost unable to go because her mother thought it would make her into a girl no one wanted to marry. Her father on the other hand wanted her to go to college. He worked as a physician …show more content…

In 1931 she and her friend and colleague, a woman named Harriet Creighton, published a paper called “A Correlation of Cytological and Genetical Crossing-over in Zea mays.” It was about establishing that chromosomes formed the basis of genetics. Due to her publications and experiments during the 1930s, in 1939 she was elected the vice president of the Genetics Society of America. Later, in 1944, she was elected president of the Genetics Society. After returning to Cornell she tried to become a professor, but they refused her because she was a woman. Luckily she did not give up and was later hired to teach by the University of Missouri. Her most important and recognizable accomplishment in genetics though was her discovery of jumping genes. Jumping genes are series of DNA that go from one place in the genome to another. She first discovered jumping genes in the late 1940s while working at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. She discovered them while she was studying chromosome breakage in maize. She found chromosome-breaking locus that could switch its position inside of a chromosome. This discovery was important because it helped make great strides in molecular biology. These strides helped lead to the discovery of transposons in other organisms, beginning with viruses and

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