The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock's Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (review)

This book admirably succeeds in its goal of debunking myths about Barbara McClintock—myths created by previous biographers, scientists, and even McClintock herself. McClintock (1902-92) was a Nobel Prize-winning corn cytogeneticist whose career spanned the twentieth century. Nathaniel Comfort makes good use of interviews and newly available sources (McClintock's correspondence and research notes). He also had the aid of both his and McClintock's colleagues from Cold Spring Harbor, where McClintock spent much of her career and where Comfort worked as a science writer while completing his Ph.D. in history of science.

Comfort first focuses a low-powered lens (to use his metaphor) on McClintock's classical cytogenetic career. Second, he uses a high-powered lens to examine more thoroughly her later work on what she called "controlling elements," but which others labeled "transposons" or "jumping genes." He supplies much evidence for a surprising new interpretation of McClintock's work: that her primary research interest from 1944 until the end of her life was the genetic control of development. Other geneticists accepted her view that transposition was a means of forming mutable genes; however, they were not convinced of her view of coordinated control of development via these elements. McClintock realized that her own interpretation was not the prevailing one. Comfort argues that, for her, the Nobel Prize in 1983 was not a long-awaited legitimization but rather a bittersweet epitaph to her genetic control theory. Thus, he challenges the myth that recognition of her work was a simple forehead-slapping realization that she had been right all along. Instead, he documents the complex social and intellectual contexts in which her work was evaluated.

Another myth that Comfort sensitively and effectively debunks is that of McClintock as a feminist heroine, the brilliant but unappreciated woman struggling for position and recognition in the man's world of science. This story is complex too, driven not only by the limits placed on women in academia in the United States in the early twentieth century but also by McClintock's own personality. She did not thrive in a teaching position, such as she held at the University of Missouri in the 1930s. Her work style was better suited to the freedom afforded by the full-time research position that she obtained in 1941 at Cold Spring Harbor, where she was, for the most part, "happy and productive" (p. 9). She was

neither "marginal" nor socially "deviant" among geneticists. Her early publications established her reputation as a cytogeneticist of the first rank. Professional achievements, such as her election to the vice presidency (1939) and presidency (1945) of the Genetics Society of America and her election to the National Academy of Sciences (1944)—only the third woman to be so honored—reflected the immense respect she earned even while still a young scientist. (pp. 8-9)

Comfort situates McClintock within the genetics community and effectively argues that she challenged the "philosophy of the gene" as part of that community, not as an outsider (p. 151).

The "myth" (to continue using his term) with which Comfort seems to have the most discomfort is one encouraged by McClintock herself: that of a holistic mystic, intuiting her results and exploring alternative perspectives outside the mainstream of science, such as ESP and UFOs. Comfort struggles to understand her interest in those subjects. One of his not-very-informative chapter titles is "Integration"—a term, he argues, that decribes her intellectual faculty better than does "intuition" (pp. 32-33): "McClintock described integration not as a single holistic leap of intuition, but rather as a form of computation, a rational, rapid process of working out connections and logical steps" (p. 68). Like others before them, both McClintock and Comfort...