Barbara McClintock

I had never even heard of the guy's name until I climbed through those boxes.

And then there was a lot of things from Barbara McClintock, who has now won a Nobel Prize.

Back then, when I was going through the boxes, she hadn't won a Nobel Prize.

But what her claim to fame was, in 1939 through the 1960s, she found in corn that genes jumped around.

George Washington Carver, who made great leaps in agricultural science, called his laboratory God's Little Workshop.

Barbara McClintock, who won a Nobel Prize in 1983, considered scientific practice as a kind of mysticism.

And our very own Dr. Samuel Ramsey, host of Crash Course Biology, is a lifelong Christian.

So let's return to the story of the three sisters for a moment.

The clearest demonstration of that idea in the book has nothing to do with rock stars.

Barbara McClintock and Grace Hopper, two women in American science in the early part of the last century, hit the same wall at roughly the same time.

Neither one could keep doing her work inside a traditional university.

Both went around it.

He won more Grammys after Led Zeppelin than during it.

Barbara McClintock, won her Nobel Prize at 81 for work she simply never stopped doing.

The culture says your story peaked at the retirement party.

The evidence, ancient and modern, says the verdict is not in as long as you are still breathing.

So

jumping jeans were first discovered by Barbara McClintock, an awesome scientist who studied basically the phenomenon, if I make it really simple, of like if you've ever seen corn that is used at like Thanksgiving or Halloween time that has all the different colors.

It turns out that the reason those different kernels have different colors is not because each one has a different genome, but because a jumping gene has jumped into different parts of the genome in each color, in each kernel.

And Barbara McClintock discovered these jumping genes.

They're basically just a gene, a piece of DNA.

That piece of DNA encodes an enzyme, basically a protein.

Maybe it was a specific person, a pair, to sort of illustrate kind of the different ways that people would expand.

Barbara McClintock and Grace Hopper are two women in science in the study.

Both were women in science in the first half of the 20th century.

Both ended up in frame by kind of a random event.

In the case of Barbara McClintock, who became this great geneticist, she had a college professor who invited her to take his class on genetics.

And the moment she took that class, things just snap clicked into place, and she discovered that she had this organic decryption machine in her head.

And she spent the rest of her life from age 20 to 90 doing nothing except solving genetics puzzles with a focus on the control of genes and transpositional genetic elements when she discovered that.

Not only did she have the science encodings, she also had these leadership encodings.

I was like, "Well, you know, can't those genes, like, transfer over into us if we're eating the food?" And, you know, back in 2004, they were like, "Oh, there's no such thing as horizontal gene transfer." And e- even back then, they knew that that was definitely the case.

A woman named Barbara McClintock had done a bunch of research on that and shown.

Yeah.

And the bacteria is really how that transfers.