Barbara McClintock discovered the first TEs in maize (Zea mays) at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. McClintock was experimenting with maize plants that had broken chromosomes.
In the winter of 1944–1945, McClintock planted corn kernels that were self-pollinated, meaning that the silk (style) of the flower received pollen from its own anther. These kernels came from a long line of plants that had been self-pollinated, causing broken arms on the end of their ninth chromosomes. As the maize plants began to grow, McClintock noted unusual color patterns on the leaves. For example, one leaf had two albino patches of almost identical size, located side by side on the leaf. McClintock hypothesized that during cell division certain cells lost genetic material, while others gained what they had lost. However, when comparing the chromosomes of the current generation of plants with the parent generation, she found certain parts of the chromosome had switched position. This refuted the popular genetic theory of the time that genes were fixed in their position on a chromosome. McClintock found that genes could not only move but they could also be turned on or off due to certain environmental conditions or during different stages of cell development.
McClintock also showed that gene mutations could be reversed. She presented her report on her findings in 1951, and published an article on her discoveries in Genetics in November 1953 entitled "Induction of Instability at Selected Loci in Maize".
At the 1951 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium where she first publicized her findings, her talk was met with dead silence. Her work was largely dismissed and ignored until the late 1960s–1970s when, after TEs were found in bacteria, it was rediscovered. She was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 for her discovery of TEs, more than thirty years after her initial research.