Barbara Mcclintock Quotes

I was just so interested in what I was doing I could hardly wait to get up in the morning and get at it. One of my friends, a geneticist, said I was a child, because only children can't wait to get up in the morning to get at what they want to do." - Dr. Barbara McClintock

If you know you are on the right track, if you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off. No matter what they say.

Now she wondered if any woman could get away with the self-promotion successful science demanded. The rare women she’d heard of who resisted convention or tried to assert themselves—Barbara McClintock, Rosalind Franklin, now apparently Ruth Lehmann—were labeled “difficult.” “Greedy” for expecting to be recognized and rewarded in the same way as men.

Zella Luria, Salva’s wife, had organized a small group of older women to mentor Alice and two other women who were starting as science professors in Boston, meeting monthly in the older women’s homes in the suburbs over after-dinner coffee. Alice enjoyed the company of the older women—Zella, Annamaria, and Ruth Hubbard, from the Harvard Biolabs. But she heard their stories the way Nancy had Barbara McClintock’s; they were from a different time, before doors had opened for women. Her own generation, she thought, would be one of transition, of careful navigation: the women had to work twice as hard as men to show they deserved the jobs that had opened up to them, and they had to be reasonable, not too aggressive—not too male. Alice was willing to work hard, and she didn’t want anyone to think she was seeking special treatment, because she didn’t think she needed it.