gerhart@wivax.UUCP (10/26/83)
"A Feeling for the Organism, The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock" by Evelyn Fox Keller, W. H. Freeman and Company, 1983. This biography of the recent Nobel Prize winner has an even balance between McClintock as person and as scientist. Her various discoveries are discribed in lots of biological detail in conjunction with the scientific history and attitudes that make them significant. McClintock did a lot of brilliant genetic research on maize in her thesis and post-graduate days in the 1930's and then couldn't get anyone to understand the 1950's discoveries for which she gained the Nobel Prize. McClintock's difficulties in obtaining employment during her mid career are described. Women could (and did at about the same rate as today) receive degrees in science but jobs were available only at women's colleges or through marriage to a scientist and "assisting" in his laboratory. The book gives a good account of this phase of history. (The author describes her own traumatic graduate career in physics at Harvard in the book "Working it Out".) The title "a feeling for the organism" is the theme of the several chapters and helps describe McClintock's mode of work. She felt that a scientist should "listen to the material", "get into the organism", and "see the oneness of all". This led her to meticulous observation habits, rigorous logic, and an ability to intuit minute genetic characteristics of a plant from just looking at it. The author relates McClintock's "capacity to be alone" to this intimate feeling for the organism. The book is well-written and makes one think about the different ways of thinking of scientists like McClintock and those of us in the technological and artificial fields of computer science and software engineering. Susan Gerhart, Wang Institute of Graduate Studies decvax!wivax!gerhart, gerhart.wang-inst@udel-relay