Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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

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!

This is a wonderful book. It is the story of a science as well as the story of a scientist. It is a story of synergy, that elusive concept that a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The book reminds us that a person is more than the collection of individual cells; that the cell is more than the collection of cytoplasm, nucleus, and chromosomes; that the chromosomes are more than the collection of individual genes; and that the science of biology is more than the collection of individual scientists. It reminds me that in the process of taking something apart to discover how it 'ticks', we frequently miss all the different ways it was originally connected. This book is not, however, limited to science and scientists -- its messages and lessons have a broader appeal and application. It can apply to any group of people, any collection of individuals, for this is also the story of a maverick. Mavericks are only considered different and unusual in relation to a group. Mavericks als

"A Feeling for the Organism" is much closer to memoir than biography. When McClintock denied Keller access to her letters and notebooks, Keller chose to rely on McClintock's recollections. Consequently, we learn how McClintock wanted others to see her, and perhaps how she wanted to see herself, but not the truth. McClintock is portrayed as a genius struggling against a world too stupid to appreciate her brilliance, but the existence of transposition was never in serious doubt; it was McClintock's theory of genetic control that was controversial, and later discarded as incorrect. For a better understanding of McClintock's work and its reception, read The Tangled Field by Nathaniel Comfort, which manages to tell the real story without diminishing the scientific importance or originality of McClintock.

This book is a biography of geneticist Barbara McClintock. Keller is a scholar and researcher with a special interest in women scientists. In this book, she presents the life and work of Barbara McClintock. She explains the importance of McClintock's work and her incredible ability to observe of genetic variation from the physical appearance of plants. She also details the context of McClintock's work, noting the difficulties McClintock faced in pushing her research program forward in an academic world that had no room for women scientists. The book is quite interesting for bringing to light McClintock's discoveries regarding gene transposition, as well as for its description of the special challenges McClintock faced as a woman trying to work in a man's world.

A very short review of this incontournable book, for all those that want to better know the scientific world or that have interest in the female conditions throughout the 20 century. Those thinking that scientists are a bit "crazy" or mystical will probably find unvaluable arguments in McClintok's personality!
The book is well writen and easy to read; even for people that do not have a background in genetics. From my point of view, those people will nevertheless have more interest in the aspects of "McClintock's as a female revolutionary scientist" rather than in "the genesis and communication of new ideas in life-science".
Most of the information provided about McClintok's life and thoughts seem acurate, even if some authors have pointed out several speculations made by Evelyn Fox Keller.

A fantastic book where the devotion to science and in particular for genetics becomes contagious. Being a woman in science I find that Barbara McClintock is a never ending inspiration.

People talk about glass ceilings, but the ceilings Barbara McClintock broke through were much colder than that. Evelyn Fox Keller, one of the most insightful writers who deals with issues of gender in science, conveys both McClintock's solitude and anguish and her passion for analyzing and understanding her organism's genes and how they affected the corn plants. The holistic approach to the organism is possibly a feminine approach to science, but in her day, admitting to female qualities was a no-no of the most chastised form. She never got tenure, never married, and finished her career as an isolated scientist at a research laboratory. But she never lost the passion for science. The Nobel prize was almost an after thought, certainly received for work completed and presented to dead silence much earlier in her career. Fox Keller sensitively conveys both what she thinks is important and what McClintock herself thought was important (just the science, ma'am!).

This book was recommended to me (a male) by a PhD candidate (female) in enology (wine studies) in response to my locating and handing her a somewhat-difficult-to locate copy of James Watson's admittedly painful-to-read but otherwise sincere memoir of the Cambridge scene surrounding the elucidation of the structure of DNA by two guys and a gal. I searched extensively for the McClintock book, out of loyalty to my friend, read it, and found it enormously informative, lyrically sustaining and theoretically stimulating, but ultimately frustrating as a coherent book because it really wasn't a conscienciously documented biography, its "scientific" diagrams of meiosis/mytosis and the corn cycle were confusing, it mixed basic explanations with unexplained terminology, and its theoretical claims concerning the whole organism weren't really thought through - the alleged necessity of including cytogenetic, holistic evidence was by its own revelations undermined by the conclusion that the self-regulation of genes was entirely genetic, rather than influenced by the cytologic or protein-containing environment. I simply don't know who this book was written for - perhaps "the widest possible audience." Conclusion: this book, full of wonderful anecdote, compelling presentation of genetic theory and its historical development, and terifically stimulating discussion of the nature of scientific and gender-limited communication, is ultimately marred by an apparent impatience to bring it to press (and profitability and reputation-enhancing publication) without due regard to biographical standards, clear integration of tri-partite intent (biography, feminist panegyric, popular science), and fundamental clarity of presentation. I learned from it, but grudgingly.