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.Along with theircolleague, French microbiologist André Michel Lwoff, at the PasteurInstitute, Jacob and Monod won the 1965 Nobel Prize in physiologyor medicine for this work.Awards Abound in the 1960s and 1970sBy the 1960s and 1970s, a shower of awards began to celebrateMcClintock s scientific prowess, although not for the jumping gene.She was considered brilliant without it, but, unfortunately, she wasnot well satisfied with the accolades: First, she was a private personand did not like being the center of attention, and second, she knew,or at least sensed, that her greatest contribution was her discoveryof mobile elements.In 1959, McClintock was elected to the National Academy ofArts and Sciences, and in 1967, she received the Kimber Medalfrom the National Academy of Sciences.In 1970, she became thefirst woman to receive the National Medal of Science, the high-est government award in science.In 1973, Cold Spring HarborLaboratory dedicated the McClintock Laboratory, and 1981 provedto be a star-studded year, as she received the MacArthur PrizeFellow Laureate Award (sometimes known as the Genius Award )the Wolf Prize in Medicine, the Albert Lasker Basic MedicalResearch Award, and the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal (sharedwith Marcus Rhoades).When McClintock s old friend George Beadle heard about theWolf Prize in Medicine, which she shared with Stanley Cohen,Beadle wrote to her: That is great but as everyone knowledgeable ofthe situation agrees it should have been recognized long ago in yourcase.I admit in the early stages of your most remarkable work I Reevaluation and Recognition 99was skeptical, he continued, but that was years ago. The greatestrecognition, however, was yet to come.The Nobel PrizeThe date was October 10, 1983, and Barbara McClintock was listen-ing to early morning radio in her apartment.Most Nobelists hear thegood news from a phone call ringing in the middle of the night atleast that is frequently the case for Nobel laureates in the UnitedStates, since the call comes from Stockholm, Sweden.McClintock,however, lived so frugally that she did not even have a telephone ather apartment.That is why she first heard of the Nobel committee sdecision on a radio news program.Her first reaction was a mur-mured complaint: Oh, dear. She was no doubt thinking of thedays of work she would miss and, well, all the unwanted personalattention (as opposed to attention to her work, which she valued).From childhood throughout her scientific career to the end of herlife, she preferred to be in control.Winning the Nobel Prize tendsto sweep one up in festivities and accolades.There would be the tripto Sweden, speeches to make, a banquet to attend all unproductivefrom McClintock s point of view.At 81, she still put in her usual schedule, starting with a briskwalk up the road in Cold Spring Harbor.She usually dressed inpractical clothes denim jeans, a no-frills tailored shirt, and sturdywalking shoes.On these walks, she typically trekked through thewoods or down Bungtown Road to the Sand Spit and back.Alongthe way, she continually stopped to look at the plants growing alongthe roadside or scattered about the woods that she passed through.Ifa friend or student had come along, she might launch into a lectureabout the flora they passed.McClintock never stopped working.Shewould notice patterns in the flowers or leaves that set her thinkingabout the genes that governed them, about control.She threw thelarge net of her mind over the diversity and patterns and integrated,as she liked to say of her thought processes.She would formulatethe connections in heredity, development, and evolution.To her thewalks were another perspective, another way of looking at her work.Sometimes she gathered walnuts along the way, as she did on this 100 BARBARA MCCLINTOCKmorning, the morning when she received the announcement of herNobel Prize.To McClintock, this was a morning in her life like any other,and she saw no reason to change her routine.When recognition andencouragement might have helped her through emotionally difficulttimes, she felt the scientific community had not understood and hadleft her solitary and doubted.She had made her way through thoseIn October 1983, Barbara McClintock was named sole Nobel laureate in physiology ormedicine for that year.(The Barbara McClintock Papers, American Philosophical Society) Reevaluation and Recognition 101times by withdrawing into her work.Now, with all the accolades, shewas not glad.As her friend Howard Green said in an article after herdeath, Barbara rose to a stratospheric level in the general esteemof the scientific world and honors were showered upon her.But shecould hardly bear them.She felt obliged to submit to them.It wasnot joy or even satisfaction that she experienced, it was martyrdom!To have her work understood and acknowledged was one thing, butto make public appearances and submit to ceremonies was quiteanother. News reporters spoke of her as intensely private and a no-nonsense researcher, but she had an upside and always enjoyeda good joke.How much more might she have bloomed if the trustand encouragement had come earlier in her career? That, however,is not the way the cards were dealt.Finally, she was ready.She knew what the world expected. Iknew I was going to be in for something, she noted. I had to psychmyself up.I had to think of the significance of it all; to react.I had toknow what approach I would take. She told the lab administrativedirector she would do what she needed to do, following up with theobligatory press release and press conference.Her press release wasupbeat, asserting that it seemed unfair to reward a person for hav-ing so much pleasure, over the years, asking the maize plant to solvespecific problems and then watching its responses. For the press conference, McClintock perched on a stool, dressedin her regular uniform freshly ironed denim pants and tailoredshirt her weather-beaten face brightened by piercing eyes and hershort, brown hair slightly grayed.Surprised when a reporter toldher the prize was worth around $190,000, her wide-eyed responsefilled the room with laughter, Oh it is, she murmured.Later in theconference, she thanked the Carnegie Institution of Washington,expressing appreciation for the freedom she had to pursue the jump-ing gene despite its long-lived unpopularity among her colleagues. The Carnegie Institution, she said, never once told me that Ishouldn t be doing it.They never once said I should publish when Iwasn t publishing. The reporters pressed the question.Had the long wait for thisrecognition made her bitter? She put on her public face and told thetruth or most of it. No, no, no, she replied.This moment was not 102 BARBARA MCCLINTOCKWhy Not Sooner?9'When Barbara McClintock became a Nobel Laureate, James D.Watson remarked, in the role of director of the Cold Spring Har-bor laboratories: It is not a controversial award
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