Barbara McClintock (2) (1902–1992)

Barbara McClintock was given the name Eleanor at birth but it was changed to Barbara in her childhood. Her father was a physician and the son of British immigrants. The family moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1908, and Barbara attended Erasmus Hall High School. She earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in botany at Cornell University, and received her Ph.D. in that subject in 1927. She became a member of a small group of scientists studying the cytogenetics of maize (corn).

In the early 1930s, with postdoctoral fellowships from the National Research Council and the Guggenheim Foundation, she conducted genetics research at several different institutions, including Cornell, the University of Missouri, and the California Institute of Technology. In 1936, she took a position as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia. Several years later, she went to work at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York, a position she held for 26 years. She remained affiliated with the laboratory until her death in 1992.

She developed theories to explain the suppression or expression of genetic information from one generation of maize plants to the next. In 1944, she became the third woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences and was the first woman to become president of the Genetics Society of America in 1945. During the 1960s, she traveled extensively, collecting interesting maize samples, and mentored junior scientists and young graduate students. Her data was finally published in 1981 as The Chromosomal Constitution of Races of Maize. In 1983, at the age of 81, she received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work.