Conversations with Barbara McClintock

[Elizabeth Blackburn]

I met Barbara McClintock because Bruce Alberts, in his very warm way, just said, "Oh, you have to meet Barbara McClintock!" So he took me down and I knew he knew how famous she was and so forth. But she just absolutely enchanted and enraptured me, because she immediately got deeply into a scientific discussion. She had all her ears of corns all around. She was showing us all the different stocks. And she was saying, "What do you do when you get strange experimental results?" - actually I remember this very, very clearly because I was telling her - I was a little shy at that point -so I just said, "And I've got strange results too that I don't understand." And she said something very wonderful like, really go with your intuition, really trust what you see." She said all these things we now know she is very famous for saying, but it was very influential for me to hear somebody like her, saying what she said. And she was just so nice. Here I was: this random person who shows up,-and she was just so nice and talked with me a lot. So when I subsequently come back for a seminar here or for subsequent symposia conferences, I would always go and make a point of visiting with her. And I remember afternoons when she would be sitting in that big office area she had with lots and lots of file cabinets and books and papers and stuff. She'd have her jellybeans, and she would just talk and talk for two and three hours. It would get late in the afternoons and she wouldn't put the lights on, and I didn't want to touch a thing; I didn't want to move, in case the spell got broken. And she would talk about so many wonderful things, which also amazed me, because she would talk about an experiment she did in the thirties, for example, a very classical experiment she'd done, and then she would immediately make some reference to some totally new thing that had just come out in a journal a couple of months ago or so. And so you had to be listening very hard because you had to make sure that you were hearing the experiments in their right context: Was this a 1970s or '80s experiment? Or was this a 1930s or '40s experiment? And conceptually she had always seen the modern and the classical linkages, and she had fused them intellectually.



[This message has been edited by Elizabeth Blackburn (edited 07-15-2002).]

[Timothy Mulligan]

She was very difficult on the researchers but she was nice to me. I don't know, I may be making up my own story but I think she saw in me a hard worker, willing to learn. I grew the last plants she ever crossed. The last maize plants she had at Uplands, I grew for her. It's an honor for me but I wish I could have done more for her. She used to come up to mentor a researcher and I would get to gab with her for a bit. She used to play banjo and so I could talk to her about improvising a jam or we would talk about geese or baseball. I tried not to let her down ever as far as the plants went. Working for a Nobel laureate is one of the best things I have ever done.