Barbara McClintock
<p><span style="FONT-SIZE: 9.5pt; COLOR: #333333; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><font color="#ffffff">In honor of Women's History Month and as a sort of antidote to recent media support of Lawrence Summers' suggestion that women are innately less suitable to enter scientific and mathematical fields, I would like to remind everyone of </font><a href="http://www.nas.edu/history/members/mcclintock.html"><font color="#ffffff">Barbara McClintock's</font></a><font color="#ffffff"> contributions to science. Evelyn Fox Keller has </font><a href="http://www.whfreeman.com/generalreaders/book.asp?disc=TRAD&id_product=1002001829&@id_course=1058000241"><font color="#ffffff">a fabulous book concerning Barbara</font></a><font color="#ffffff">, called </font></span><strong><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #333333; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><font color="#ffffff">A Feeling for the Organism </font></span></strong><b><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #333333; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><strong><span style="FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><font color="#ffffff">The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. </font></span></strong></span></b><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #333333; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><font color="#ffffff">Barbara McClintock represents an instance of how women's cognition is necessary to accurately express the complexities of scientific phenomenon, that traditional reductionistic approaches cannot adequately express. Barbara McClintock was a </font><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytology"><font color="#ffffff">cytologist</font></a><font color="#ffffff"> who studied higher-level (more complex) organisms than her male counterparts. Although she was a renowned researcher well before 1929, she could not get a tenure track position at a University until 1936, and it was an entry-level position. </font></span><span style="FONT-SIZE: 9.5pt; COLOR: #333333; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"></span></p><p><font color="#ffffff"></font></p><p><span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #333333; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><font color="#ffffff">Barbara had a unique ability to recognize complex structural relationships in genetic materials by observation that allowed her to discover sophisticated genetic interrelationships, like "mobile genetic elements", for which she was granted a </font><a href="http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1983/"><font color="#ffffff">Nobel prize in 1983</font></a><font color="#ffffff">. Barbara discovered this phenomenon in the 1940's and yet it took several decades to receive acknowledgment.  It appears that women's interconnected way of thinking actually contributed to Barbara McClintock's brilliance, rather than detracted from it. What do you think of that Lawrence?!</font></span></p>