Jumping Ship and Jumping Genes
 

My vision focused when Barbara McClintock focused her eyes on me and said, "When you know you're right, they can't hurt you." It was my first visit to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, for an oncogene meeting in the late eighties. My Ph.D. advisor, Fuyuhiko Tamanoi, a CSHL alum, was showing me and my graduate school colleagues about, and he took us to visit Barbara. Barbara was one of those people that women in science were raised on. Graduate school, unfortunately, had substantially yellowed the white of my ivory tower image of science. So I sat in Barbara's laboratory, a demoralized, shell-shocked graduate student, amazed that she still came to lab nearly every day, and gazed through microscopes with eyes long since blurred with cataracts. (On our arrival, she had confessed softly to us, but with an odd sense of pride, that only one of her eyes still worked well enough to use.) My colleagues listened closely as Barbara spoke of chromatin binding proteins and DNA domains. I wondered about transposons and corn, but mostly about whether I would be able to make myself go to the lab in two years, let alone for decades. It bothered me. I adored science. But I abhored benchwork. My daydreaming came to an abrupt halt when I noticed silence. I raised my eyes and found Barbara's attention suddenly focused on me. Her eyes were faded and opaque, but her gaze was intense. It seemed as if the others in the room faded into the bookshelves around me. "When you know you're right..." she stated. A worried voice in my head wondered, "WHEN was that?" But I did know. And I finally embraced the truth of it, and stopped worrying about what my colleagues thought. That one sentence was, like Barbara's work and words have been for so many others, an inspiration for me. But unlike others- it was to leave the bench, not stay with it. For that I thank her. Reading, writing, and publishing science has been a joy that I never would or could have planned. Jumping ship, as many my friends at the time called it, ended up being as wonderful for me as Barbara's discovery of jumping genes was for the entire community.