Chapter 1, A Historical Overview Summary and Analysis

Genetics was a young science when Barbara McClintock became involved in it. Gregor Mendel's work had been rediscovered in 1900, two years before she was born. When McClintock enrolled at Cornell in 1919, genetics was only just beginning to come into its own, given the famed genetics studies of the genes of the fruit fly Drosophila and other works during the 1910s. McClintock earned her PhD in botany from Cornell's College of Agriculture, but the fruit fly related excitement had not yet spread there. Cornell's geneticists studied mostly corn, which matures slowly, whereas fruit flies generate new generations within ten days, allowing for detailed experimentation. McClintock came to believe that both fruit flies and corn could be studied at the genetic level by examining chromosomes at the microscopic level, not merely through breeding. In 1931, Harriet Creighton (McClintock's...