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"This biographical study illuminates one of the most important yet misunderstood figures in the history of science. Barbara McClintock (1902-1992), a geneticist who integrated classical genetics with microscopic observations of the behaviour of chromosomes, was regarded as a genius and as an unorthodox, nearly incomprehensible thinker. In 1946, she discovered mobile genetic elements, which she called ""controlling elements."" Thirty-seven years later, she won a Nobel Prize for this work, becoming the third woman to receive an unshared Nobel in science. Since then, McClintock has become an emblem of feminine scientific thinking and the tragedy of narrow-mindedness and bias in science. Using McClintock's research notes, available correspondence, and dozens of interviews with McClintock and others, Comfort argues that, contrary to various accounts, including Keller's, McClintock's work was neither ignored in the 1950s nor wholly accepted two decades later. Nor was McClintock marginalized by scientists; throughout the decades of her alleged rejection, she remained a distinguished figure in her field."

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In this ambitious biographical study of Barbara McClintock...[Comfort] challenges the standard interpretation of her science and her life...Comfort has reconstructed in great detail, experiment by experiment, McClintock's work on transposons...He spent years deciphering her cramped and faded handwriting in lab notebooks, on seed packets and in letters to her closest friends... The Tangled Field will certainly stand as the definitive work on Barbara McClintock's discovery of transposition and her ambition to explain development through controlling elements...Comfort does admirably what he set out to do--answer the many fascinating and troubling questions about McClintock's Nobel Prize-winning research, including why it took almost 40 years not to rediscover Barbara McClintock's work but to reinterpret it. -- Carla C. Keirns American Scientist (01/01/2002)

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