ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Barbara McClintock (1902–1992): Listening to the genome beyond the outsider myth

• In Event: Unorthodox Women, Unorthodox Ideas in Modern Biological Research

English Abstract

Barbara McClintock (1902–1992) is frequently portrayed as the solitary genius of modern genetics—an eccentric figure who, as Josehua Lederberg famously remarked, was “either crazy or a genius.” Her discovery of transposable elements and her insistence on “listening to the organism” have contributed to a powerful narrative of epistemic independence. Yet this narrative has also produced a historiographical tension: while Evelyn Fox Keller celebrated McClintock as a visionary outsider, Nathaniel Comfort emphasised her deep embeddedness within mid-century genetics and the ways in which the outsider myth was retrospectively amplified, not least through McClintock’s own Nobel-era self-presentations.
In this talk, I revisit McClintock’s life and work through this contested historiography. Rather than accepting the familiar storyline “from marginalisation to Nobel Prize,” I examine how outsider status is produced, stabilised, and mobilised in the life sciences. Drawing on secondary analysis of oral histories and the literature, I argue that McClintock’s unorthodoxy lay less in social isolation than in her epistemic stance: an intuitive, relational, and context-sensitive mode of inquiry that resisted the increasingly reductionist orientation of post-war molecular biology.
This paper moves beyond this dichotomy by reframing McClintock’s unorthodoxy not as social marginality but as an epistemic stance. Her concept of “controlling elements” (Ac/Ds), first published between 1950 and 1953, challenged the prevailing view of the genome as static and stable. Her decision to cease publishing on the subject after encountering “puzzlement, even hostility” highlights not isolation per se, but a deeper clash of paradigms within post-war biology.
This paper argues that McClintock’s intuitive and relational mode of inquiry anticipated later forms of epistemic pluralism—and invites us to rethink how scientific authority is constructed, contested, and remembered.

Author

• Felicitas Petra Söhner, Department of the History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine