Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock (1902–1992) was born in Hartford, Connecticut on June 16, and earned a doctorate in botany at Cornell University in 1927. Her early work on maize cytogenetics in R. A. Emerson's group at Cornell University in the 1920s and 1930s (where she worked with Marcus Rhoades, George Beadle, Harriet Creighton, Charles Burnham, and others) provided crucial evidence for the chromosomal basis of genetic crossover. Later, McClintock moved to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York where she continued her groundbreaking research in genetics. But of her many achievements, her work on genetic transposition stands out as the most revolutionary. This work, establishing the mobility of genetic elements, defied conventional assumptions of the fixity of genes on the chromosomes and went unheeded for many years by most geneticists. But in 1983, thirty-two years after her first definitive paper on the subject, she was awarded the Nobel...