Word: mendell
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That understated response to the greatest honor in science was typical of the intensely private, no-nonsense researcher. Genetics is a science founded by a monk-19th century Augustinian Gregor Mendel-and McClintock is in every sense his disciple. For half a century she has labored in almost monastic solitude over her patch of Indian corn, or maize, much as Mendel did in his famous pea patch. In an era when most scientific work is done by large research teams, McClintock did not even have a laboratory assistant. ("Excuse me for being hoarse," she once told a scientist who stopped...
Molecular biology, in part, is rooted in the science of genetics. Ever since Cro-Magnon man, parents have probably wondered why their children resemble them. But not until an obscure Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel began planting peas in his monastery's garden in the mid-19th century were the universal laws of heredity worked out. By tallying up the variations in the offspring peas, Mendel determined that traits are passed from generation to generation with mathematical precision in small, separate packets, which became known as genes (from the Greek word for race...
...Mendel's ideas were so unorthodox that they were ignored for 35 years. But by the time the Mendelian concept was rediscovered at the turn of the century, scientists were better prepared for it. They already suspected that genetic information was hidden inside pairs of tiny, threadlike strands in cell nuclei called chromosomes, or colored bodies (for their ability to pick up dyes). During cell division they always split lengthwise, giving each daughter cell a full share of what was presumed to be hereditary material...
Many scientists are unwilling to concede any significant increase in cheating. After all, the ancient astronomer Ptolemy may have occasionally faked observations to fit his model of the universe. Isaac Newton, the father of classical physics, and the saintly monk Gregor Mendel, who founded genetics, were apparently not above fudging some of their specific data to fit a generally true theory. Defenders of present scientific procedures say the only change has been psychological: what Dr. William Raub, NIH's associate director for grants and contracts, dismisses as "a heightened consciousness and a willingness to talk" about cheating. Other observers...
...does not splice, cut or reshuffle the genes of viruses and bacteria. Rather, for the past four decades, Geneticist Barbara McClintock has been carefully breeding and crossbreeding corn, trying to cull from it some kernels of truth about the secrets of genetic diversity, just as the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel did in his famous pea patch more than a century ago. McClintock's colleagues, caught up in the latest wizardry of genetic engineering, have long marveled at the skill and diligence with which she pursued such classical genetics, but they were sometimes patronizing about her work. After...