On October 4, 1983, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Barbara McClintock had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her discovery of genetic transposition — the finding that genes can move between locations on chromosomes. She was eighty-one years old. The Nobel was awarded for work she had done in the 1940s. For much of the intervening forty years, the scientific establishment had dismissed her findings as incomprehensible.

McClintock was born in 1902 in Hartford, Connecticut. She studied genetics at Cornell and stayed on as a researcher after completing her doctorate in 1927, because no university with a genetics program would hire a woman as a faculty member. She worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, independently funded by small grants, from 1941 until her death.

Her work on maize genetics — she studied corn — revealed that genes were not fixed on chromosomes but could move, activating and deactivating other genes as they did so. She presented this work at a Cold Spring Harbor symposium in 1951. The response from the molecular biologists who dominated the field was incomprehension and dismissal. They told each other she had "gone off the deep end." She was described as "mystical" — a word used consistently to dismiss women scientists whose work the mainstream couldn't follow.

She stopped publishing her transposition work and continued her research alone for two decades. The discovery of molecular mechanisms in the 1960s and 1970s eventually provided the framework that explained what she had seen. The Nobel followed.

She kept working until the week of her death at ninety in 1992.