Word: mcclintock
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...David McClintock, associate dean of students, said disciplinary charges have been filed against a total of 23 students in the case that began when two students were arrested in the burglary of a U.T. building last December...
...scientific anachronism, and not because of her 79 years. Unlike most scientists at the famed biology laboratory in the small Long Island, N.Y., town of Cold Spring Harbor, she does not splice, cut or reshuffle the genes of viruses and bacteria. Rather, for the past four decades, Geneticist Barbara McClintock has been carefully breeding and crossbreeding corn, trying to cull from it some kernels of truth about the secrets of genetic diversity, just as the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel did in his famous pea patch more than a century ago. McClintock's colleagues, caught up in the latest wizardry...
...judgment was premature. In the twilight of her career, McClintock is suddenly being hailed as a scientific prophet. This year she has received eight awards, the richest and most prestigious just last week: a $60,000-a-year, taxfree, lifetime grant from Chicago's MacArthur Foundation and the Lasker prize for basic research, worth $15,000 and often a steppingstone to a Nobel Prize...
...McClintock's colleagues believed in her ideas when she first considered them in the 1940s. After majoring in biology at Cornell, and adding a botany Ph.D., she began methodically cultivating maize on a little plot near an inlet of Long Island Sound. McClintock, funded by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, kept careful watch over the kaleidoscopic changes of color in the leaves and kernels of corn from one generation to the next. The changes were produced by underlying modifications in genetic structure. At the time, though, no one understood how DNA was put together or how it worked. Indeed...
...some kernels, McClintock began finding curious, quirky patterns of pigmentation. A less imaginative scientist might have dismissed them as natural variations occurring at random. But through painstaking record keeping and careful analysis, McClintock discerned a method in nature's seeming madness. The pigment genes, those causing the splotch es of color on the kernels, were somehow being switched off or on in a particular generation. Still more remarkable, the same "switches" often seemed to crop up a generation later at different places along the same chromosome or even on a totally different chromosome. Indeed, these mysterious "controlling elements...