A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock [Paperback]

Evelyn Fox Keller (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 071671504X | ISBN-13: 978-0716715047 | Publication Date: February 15, 1984 | Edition: 10th anniversary ed

A biography of the Nobel Prize-winning scientist explains her work in genetics and traces her long unheralded career as a research scientist.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Barbara McClintock was one of the premier investigators in cytology and classical genetics, but her work was pushed out of the mainstream by the revolution in molecular biology in the middle of this century. Thirty years later, the simple truths sought by research scientists whose training was closer to physics than biology continued to prove elusive, and the discovery of transposons in bacteria marked the beginning of a revival of interest in her work. Keller's analysis of McClintock's difficulty in finding a place to work and her relations with other investigators is insightful and thought-provoking, not only about women in science, but about the role of dissent in the scientific community.

From Publishers Weekly

This biography of the pioneering geneticist McClintock originally appeared in 1983, just before she was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 235 pages
• Publisher: W. H. Freeman; 10th anniversary ed edition (February 15, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 071671504X
• ISBN-13: 978-0716715047
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #755,196 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I admire Dr. McClintock's courage, spirit and science., June 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (Paperback)

Imagine being devalued simply because you are a woman in a man's career at a time when that made you an oddity. Then imagine having a mind brilliant enough to identify and understand transposable elements at a time when your science is so far ahead of everyone else's work that they cannot understand you or take you seriously. Put those two factors together and imagine how much confidence and courage it took for her to stick with her studies of maize genetics until everyone else caught up with her. Even if you're not interested in her science, you can't read this book and not be inspired by the woman. Dr. McClintock is my hero on many levels.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Must read for anyone interested in women in science!, June 30, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (Paperback)

I discovered this book as I was looking for a text for my university seminar, "Women in Science". The search has been frustrating because there are so few readable but substantive books on women who have contributed to our knowledge of the world. There's a lot of fluff; but what I wanted to show my students was the struggles as well as the triumphs--the frustrations, as well as the acolades. I wanted them to see the scientific landscape through the eyes of a woman, and to hear her voice. This book offered that and so much more. Unlike Sy Montgomery's "Walking with the Great Apes" (Houghton Mifflin, 1991), which follows the careers of Goodall, Fossey and Galdikas, Keller resists the temptation to go kitsch. Instead, she showed what made Barbara McClintock a Nobel Prize winner and a scientific outsider. --Nan Crystal Arens, Assistant Professor, Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Life in Science., December 30, 2005

By 

A .J. Casper (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Feeling for the Organism, 10th Aniversary Edittion: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (Paperback)

Barbara McClintock was a maverick from the very beginning. Her parents did not consider education as the best option for a woman. Her relationship with her mother was particularly frictitious. She made the decision to study botany at Cornell, and her love of the genetics grew. She worked on maize at a time when most cytogeneticists were working on Drosophila. It can easily be argued that nobody understood the maize plant and its genetics as well as she did at the time.

The book can get quite technical midway, and will be appreciated best by those with a background in genetics. McClintock was a woman way ahead of her time, in fact, decades ahead. She could not be promoted to certain positions at several institutions simply because she is female (despite a superior knowledge in cytogenetics).

It took approximately 5 years for McClintock to finish and publish her results on transposable elements in chromosomes (transposons). She gave numerous presentations on her discoveries and nobody understood - at a time when molecular biology was taking over the field of cytogenetics. This book shows that science is not always objective. It also brings up legitimate points as to whether the prevailing Western view of Science (i.e. the scientific method) is efficient enough in scientific research and discovery.

I highly recommend this book!