Question

Barbara McClintock, Lynn Margulis (who also wrote under the name Lynn Sagan), and Angélique Arvanitaki were woman scientists working in the mid 20th century, whose ideas were all somewhat out of the mainstream in their fields. Choose one of them, describe their work, and try to work out how this work was received at the time. Are there any connections that might be made to the themes seen in feminist philosophy of science?

All three are biologists. If you know an example from physics or chemistry and want to cover that one instead, go ahead. But don’t write about Rosalind Franklin. Her story is very well known. Choose someone else, or stick with McClintock, Margulis, or Arvanitaki. Of those three, there is much less information about Arvanitaki – this would be the harder choice.

Write 200-300 words.

Answer 1

Barbara McClintock was a cytogeneticist and was awarded Nobel prize for medicine in the year 1983. She worked on genetic recombination in missed. Her work focussed on transposition of genes and their molecular mechanisms of turning on and off a particular trait. She put forward her theories to explain about the expression and repression of genes from one generation to other in the maize plants. But her results were received with skepticism and it took 20 to 30 years more for the other scientists to know about the creditworthiness of her study.