Awards & Winners

Barbara McClintock

Date of Birth 16-June-1902
Place of Birth Hartford
(United States of America, Connecticut, Hartford County, Area code 959, Area code 860, Area codes 860 and 959)
Nationality United States of America
Also know as Barbara. McClintock
Profession Scientist, Geneticist
Barbara McClintock, was an American scientist and one of the world's most distinguished cytogeneticists, the 1983 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927. There she started her career as the leader in the development of maize cytogenetics, the focus of her research for the rest of her life. From the late 1920s, McClintock studied chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize. Her work was groundbreaking; she developed the technique for visualizing maize chromosomes and used microscopic analysis to demonstrate many fundamental genetic ideas. One of those ideas was the notion of genetic recombination by crossing-over during meiosis—a mechanism by which chromosomes exchange information. She produced the first genetic map for maize, linking regions of the chromosome to physical traits. She demonstrated the role of the telomere and centromere, regions of the chromosome that are important in the conservation of genetic information. She was recognized among the best in the field, awarded prestigious fellowships, and elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944.

Awards by Barbara McClintock

Check all the awards nominated and won by Barbara McClintock.

1983


Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
(for her discovery of mobile genetic elements.)

1982


Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize
(For her research in the evolution of genetic information and the control of its expression.)

1981


Wolf Prize in Medicine
(for her imaginative and important contributions to our understanding of chromosome structure behaviour and function, and for her identification and description of transposable genetic (mobile) elements.)
Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research
(For her unparalleled achievement in first discovering that certain genetic elements are not static, as was once believed, but can move about from one location to another on DNA, the genetic material of heredity.)

1970


National Medal of Science for Biological Sciences
(For establishing the relations between inherited characters in plants and the detailed shapes of their chromosomes, and for showing that some genes are controlled by other genes within chromosomes.)