by Howard Green*
To paraphrase George Orwell, every person is unique, but some are more unique than others. There has never been anyone like Barbara McClintock in this world, nor ever will be. She was not simply a representative of
by Howard Green*
To paraphrase George Orwell, every person is unique, but some are more unique than others. There has never been anyone like Barbara McClintock in this world, nor ever will be. She was not simply a representative of a type. Some have considered her as an eccentric, others as a heroine of Science, and still others as a model to be imitated. I would like to tell you how I think of her.
Barbara McClintock was a woman who rejected a woman’s life for herself. She began to do it as a small child and never deviated. Her childhood was not a happy one, and perhaps this provided the force, the moral tension that was so strong in her and so necessary for the life she lived. And we must not forget that at the foundation of every creative life there lies a sense of personal inadequacy that energizes the struggle. This sense was strong in Barbara.
Barbara deliberately chose a solitary life without encumbrances, but she did not reject womanhood. In a feminine way, she once said to me “I cannot fight for myself, but I can fight for others.” In a time of confusion about such matters, it is important to note that Barbara did not fight against herself by choosing a path that was inconsistent with her nature or her capacity. This is why she could, at the end, say “I have lived a wonderful life and I have no regrets about it.” This does not mean that Barbara’s life of isolation protected her from inner storms and passions. On the contrary, she was familiar with periods of depression, sense of futility and, yes, tears of frustration and rage. Yet her final judgment on her life was strongly affirmative.
Science is not a career, and when it is made into one, it risks becoming falsified. As a scientist, Barbara was a prototypic non-careerist. This was not because she restrained a natural impulse to do otherwise, but because she could not imagine science as a vehicle for personal advancement. Barbara was successful in science at an early age and received general recognition at the time. But later, during the fifties and sixties, when she was doing her most original work, she was ignored to such an extent that she did not even want to publish. From time to time, her morale was low, even though she was utterly confident of her most important discovery: the mobility of genetic elements. We are all, unfortunately, dependent on recognition. We grow with it and suffer without it. When transposons were demonstrated in bacteria, yeast and other organisms, Barbara rose to a stratospheric level in the general esteem of the scientific world and honors were showered upon her. But she could hardly bear them. She felt obliged to submit to them: it was not joy or even satisfaction that she experienced; it was martyrdom! To have her work understood and acknowledged was one thing, but to make public appearances and submit to ceremonies was quite another.
Barbara did not permit her inner disturbances to unsettle the course of her life or her work. This was possible only because she was so permeated by sincerity. Her accomplishments in science depended on her respect for the way things were and not on her need to discover something. Some have spoken of Barbara’s way of understanding as that of a mystic and I think there are grounds for this view. For Barbara, Truth had a mystical origin, whether outside or inside herself and she had a deeply respectful attitude toward it. Her slowness in publication was in part because, as she once said to me, “I knew there must be no mistake.” Everyone who knew Barbara knew that if she affirmed something to be so, her verdict would be correct. I felt this very strongly and if I sometimes found it difficult to understand her explanations, I didn’t worry much about it; I was confident of her conclusions. She was a kind of mystic genius, in the sense that she knew things that she could not explain, and so it was sometimes impossible to understand how she knew what she knew.
Her way of comprehending was swift and direct. Her extraordinary grasp of cytology and genetics does not account for her discoveries. These depended on something more, which I will call insight. This is something she had about people, too. She had strong reactions to them and was particularly sensitive to what was not quite right about them. She was not fooled or foolable. Her judgments were not put-downs and had no tinge of malice, but they were based on a no-longer-current way of looking at people and taking their measure. They were not value-free because Barbara had values. Perhaps few people know this, but she was not part of our compassionate age and did not share its acceptance of almost anything. With respect to the formation of young scientists, she didn’t approve of all the tender, loving care accorded them by those in charge. “What’s the fuss about students?” she once asked me. “Let them sink or swim!”
Among her talents was the ability to dominate those rebellio