A Feeling for the Organism, 10th Aniversary Edition: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock

Barbara McClintock (1902 - 1992) won the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 for work she began in the 1940s on what we now call transposons -- mobile genetic elements, "jumping genes", in maize (what in the USA we usually call "corn"). Although The Nobel Committee often takes a long time to recognize important work, this was a longer gap than usual. That was partly because she was a woman, but it was also because her work was difficult for her contemporaries to understand. The science is genuinely difficult. Even I, a card-carrying geneticist, find genetics papers among the most difficult to understand. Furthermore, McClintock was just a terrible, terrible writer. But in the 70s transposons were rediscovered in bacteria and other organisms. (The word "transposon" dates from those years.) They were discovered to be of fundamental importance. For instance, HIV is a type of transposon. It helped also that in the 70s recombinant DNA technology was developed and made the study of transposons much more straightforward.Although it is fair to view McClintock's life as an example of the struggles women in science faced (and still face), the full story is more complicated than that. She struggled in part for reasons that would have cause a man to struggle, too. Her work was genuinely esoteric, and she was a terrible communicator. It's a more complicated story than most people want to hear, and Evelyn Fox Keller tells it fairly and sympathetically. McClintock was a member, arguably the star, of the maize genetics group at Cornell university. There's a great photo in the book of the group, which includes at least two future Nobel Laureates, McClintock herself and George Beadle. She was an irrepressible ball of fire, and her spirit comes through vividly in this biography.McClintock accepted a permanent position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where she worked until her death. Fox Keller tells an anecdote that encapsulated how McClintock was viewed by fellow scientists. One scientist mentioned to another McClintock's suggestion that genes could hop around in genomes, an idea that seemed extremely implausible at the time. The second scientist answered that, if McClintock said it was so, it must be true. She was The Best!Evelyn Fox Keller is herself a scientist of some note. She along with Lee Segel developed one of the most important mathematical models in biology. She is also well-known for her work on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science.

A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintockby Evelyn Fox KellerI bought this book because I had never heard of Barbara McClintock, and because I was excited to learn that she might be a fully-formed early version of contemporary scientists of various disciplines who are not afraid to include intuitively acquired knowledge as a normal part of what they regard as legitimate information. In this, I was not disappointed. Because McClintock (who won the Nobel Prize in 1983, at the age of 81) was less unusual for being the rare female in the austere science of genetics, even more rare for winning the Nobel, but most rare of all in that she was a classical (i.e. “so yesterday”) corn geneticist who admitted – only when directly asked – that she knew each of her corn plants “intimately,” by recognition and daily habit, and that this knowledge, which she called “a feel for the organism,” she considered an essential element in her research. She didn't just send her lab assistants out into her research corn fields, she allotted large chunks of her own time to what might seem like “wandering among the corn,” in order to maintain her own body, mind, and spirit as an instrument in transferring vital information from one way of life (plant) to another (human).Fox Keller has done a wonderful job of dealing with various mine fields around the issues of gender in science, with the incredible complexity of genetics itself and the fact that its practitioners are hard put to keep up with the literature (i.e. they don't always read or even understand one another's scientific publications). She avoids long drawn-out turf wars among scientists, upon which many so-called biographies of famous people are often structured. I am only disappointed that her book was written before the current wave of scientists like David George Haskell, Suzanne Simard, Vaclav Cilek, Ellen Meloy, Craig Childs, Monica Gagliano, and for that matter John McPhee – to name just a handful – in whose company McClintock would have been able to plant at least one firm foot.

People talk about glass ceilings, but the ceilings Barbara McClintock broke through were much colder than that. Evelyn Fox Keller, one of the most insightful writers who deals with issues of gender in science, conveys both McClintock's solitude and anguish and her passion for analyzing and understanding her organism's genes and how they affected the corn plants. The holistic approach to the organism is possibly a feminine approach to science, but in her day, admitting to female qualities was a no-no of the most chastised form. She never got tenure, never married, and finished her career as an isolated scientist at a research laboratory. But she never lost the passion for science. The Nobel prize was almost an after thought, certainly received for work completed and presented to dead silence much earlier in her career. Fox Keller sensitively conveys both what she thinks is important and what McClintock herself thought was important (just the science, ma'am!).

Keller does an excellent job of elucidating McClintock's work and her original way of thinking and seeing, ways that made her ahead of her time, but ultimately led to her Noble. Keller's descriptions of the science are pretty technical but still accessible to the non-scientist (such as myself). Keller also does a great job of handling the difficult aspects of McClintock's personality -- of her difficulties with communicating and with feeling like -- and being -- an outsider. One can see how the family of origin contributed to McClintock's struggles with personal isolation. Keller shows this without any armchair psychologizing -- she lets her readers make the conclusions if they want to. I finished this book with immense respect for McClinock and also for Keller. Highly recommended and thoroughly enjoyable.

It is one of the best book that I've already read and I almost missed it just out of prejudice, becaused it informs us that the autor is a feminist, I confess. Well, it has nothing to do with propaganda or agenda, it possess a novel quality, being (this book) thrilling and marvelously telling a humane, perseverant and plentiful life history in a clear, honest and exciting way. Just loved it. The biological and phylosophical messages are profound. Finally, after reading it. I immediately ordered the book "Making Sense of Life". Wish I had done that long ago, but I was deterred by the same prejudice I mentioned before. It is time to fix this error. Can't wait to read it! Thank you, Mrs. Keller.

This is a story of the interaction between an individual scientist, Barbara McClintock (1902--1992), and a science, genetics.[1] The book serves simultaneously as a biography and as an intellectual story. Evelyn Fox Keller shows how science is both highly personal and a communal endeavor.[2]The role of observation in Barbara McClintock's experimental work provides the key to her understanding. What for others is interpretation, or speculation, is for her trained direct perception.[3] McClintock pushed her observational and cognitive skills so far that few could follow her.[4] She talked about the limits of verbally explicit reasoning and stressed the importance of having a "feeling for the organism." Her understanding emerged from a thorough absorption in, and even identification with, her material.[5]The word "understanding," and the particular meaning Barbara McClintock attributed to it, is the cornerstone of her entire approach to science. For McClintock, the smallest details provided the keys to the larger whole. It was her conviction that the closer her focus, the greater her attention to the unique characteristics of a single plant, the more she could learn about the general principles by which the plant as a whole was organized.[6]Over and over again, Barbara McClintock emphasized that one must have the time to look, the patience to "hear what the material has to say to you," the openness to "let it come to you." Above all, one must have "a feeling for the organism.". "No two plants are exactly alike. They're all different, and as a consequence, you have to know that difference," she explained. Both literally and figuratively, her "feeling for the organism" extended her vision.[7]For Barbara McClintock, reason — at least in the conventional sense of the word — is not by itself adequate to describe the vast complexity of living forms. Organisms have a life and order of their own that scientists can only partially fathom. No models we invent can begin to do full justice to the prodigious capacity of organisms to devise means for guaranteeing their own survival. It is the overall organization, or orchestration, that enables the organism to meet its needs, whatever they might be, in ways that never cease to surprise us. That capacity for surprise gave McClintock immense pleasure.[8]Our surprise is a measure of our tendency to underestimate the flexibility of living organisms. The adaptability of plants tends to be especially unappreciated. There is no question that plants have all kinds of sensitivities.[9] The ultimate descriptive task, for both artists and scientists, is to "ensoul" what one sees, to attribute to it the life one shares with it.[10] In short, one must have a "feeling for the organism."Barbara McClintock had a holistic perspective and got a much deeper understanding than most scientists because she was interested in and got a "feeling for the whole organism." Barbara McClintock was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. I find her life and work most fascinating.Notes:[1] Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (W. H. Freeman and Company, 1982), p.ix.[2] Ibid., p.xiii.[3] Ibid., p.xiii.[4] Ibid., pp.xiii--xiv.[5] Ibid., p.xiv.[6] Ibid., p.101.[7] Ibid., p.198.[8] Ibid., p.199.[9] Ibid., p.199.[10] Ibid., p.204.

It was a good read. Captured the essence of Barbara McClintock considered the Mother of Cytogenetics. Through field work and keen scientific observations and painstaking work, Barbara achieved much without the modern sophisticated tools we have for molecular genetics, and cytoscopy.Her Nobel Prize came very very late.Her life, as of many such passionate women in science, was a hard painstaking struggle against many intrinsic /man-made odds.

Das Buch ist toll. Ich habe selber lange in der Forschung gearbeitet, dieses Buch war immer wichtig für mich. Ich habe es jetzt neu gekauft und an eine Nachwuchs-Wissenschaftlerin verschenkt. Aber die Papier- und Druckqualität sind unglaublich schlecht, so etwas sollte nicht verkauft werden dürfen. Papier grob, gelblich, wird sicher nach ein paar Jahren spröde, Druck unscharf. Man fragt sich, ob das wirklich ein Original vom Verlag ist oder aus zweifelhaften Quellen stammt.

A woman in Genetics-Jumping Genes in Maize...wanted to know Barbara McClintok. Perfect for me.