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A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock
by Evelyn Fox Keller
Product Group: Book
Publisher: W. H. Freeman (1984-02-15)
ISBN: 071671504X
EAN: 9780716715047
Dewey Decimal #: 575.10924
Paperback: 235 pages
Edition: 10th anniversary ed
SKU: SG-VJ6R-UP6S
Condition: As New
Comments: minor shelfwear. text is clean no marks or highlights. very gently read. same or next business day shipping.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
A biography of the Nobel Prize-winning scientist explains her work in genetics and traces her long unheralded career as a research scientist.
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Amazon.com Review
Barbara McClintock was one of the premier investigators in cytology and classical genetics, but her work was pushed out of the mainstream by the revolution in molecular biology in the middle of this century. Thirty years later, the simple truths sought by research scientists whose training was closer to physics than biology continued to prove elusive, and the discovery of transposons in bacteria marked the beginning of a revival of interest in her work. Keller's analysis of McClintock's difficulty in finding a place to work and her relations with other investigators is insightful and thought-provoking, not only about women in science, but about the role of dissent in the scientific community.
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Customer Reviews
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A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-03-08
A very short review of this incontournable book, for all those that want to better know the scientific world or that have interest in the female conditions throughout the 20 century. Those thinking that scientists are a bit "crazy" or mystical will probably find unvaluable arguments in McClintok's personality!
The book is well writen and easy to read; even for people that do not have a background in genetics. From my point of view, those people will nevertheless have more interest in the aspects of "McClintock's as a female revolutionary scientist" rather than in "the genesis and communication of new ideas in life-science".
Most of the information provided about McClintok's life and thoughts seem acurate, even if some authors have pointed out several speculations made by Evelyn Fox Keller.
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Bit wordy...
Rating (4)
Date: 2007-02-16
0 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
Bare in mind as I begin this review that I am not interested in science. I read this book as part of a philosophy course interested in "ways of seeing." We looked at this books to discuss scientific ways of seeing and the fact that McClintock saw scientific things that her colleagues didn't see. The book is very interesting, if a bit wordy, and would probably be fascinating to someone actually interested in the topic. If you need to know about the life and work of Barbara McClintock- then the title does not lie. This book will give you a very in depth look at the woman's life and struggles and triumphs.
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The McClintock Myth
Rating  (2)
Date: 2006-12-17
4 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful
"A Feeling for the Organism" is much closer to memoir than biography. When McClintock denied Keller access to her letters and notebooks, Keller chose to rely on McClintock's recollections. Consequently, we learn how McClintock wanted others to see her, and perhaps how she wanted to see herself, but not the truth. McClintock is portrayed as a genius struggling against a world too stupid to appreciate her brilliance, but the existence of transposition was never in serious doubt; it was McClintock's theory of genetic control that was controversial, and later discarded as incorrect. For a better understanding of McClintock's work and its reception, read The Tangled Field by Nathaniel Comfort, which manages to tell the real story without diminishing the scientific importance or originality of McClintock.
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What it takes to break the icy ceiling
Rating  (5)
Date: 2006-06-22
People talk about glass ceilings, but the ceilings Barbara McClintock broke through were much colder than that. Evelyn Fox Keller, one of the most insightful writers who deals with issues of gender in science, conveys both McClintock's solitude and anguish and her passion for analyzing and understanding her organism's genes and how they affected the corn plants. The holistic approach to the organism is possibly a feminine approach to science, but in her day, admitting to female qualities was a no-no of the most chastised form. She never got tenure, never married, and finished her career as an isolated scientist at a research laboratory. But she never lost the passion for science. The Nobel prize was almost an after thought, certainly received for work completed and presented to dead silence much earlier in her career. Fox Keller sensitively conveys both what she thinks is important and what McClintock herself thought was important (just the science, ma'am!).
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A Life in Science.
Rating (4)
Date: 2005-12-30
3 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
Barbara McClintock was a maverick from the very beginning. Her parents did not consider education as the best option for a woman. Her relationship with her mother was particularly frictitious. She made the decision to study botany at Cornell, and her love of the genetics grew. She worked on maize at a time when most cytogeneticists were working on Drosophila. It can easily be argued that nobody understood the maize plant and its genetics as well as she did at the time.
The book can get quite technical midway, and will be appreciated best by those with a background in genetics. McClintock was a woman way ahead of her time, in fact, decades ahead. She could not be promoted to certain positions at several institutions simply because she is female (despite a superior knowledge in cytogenetics).
It took approximately 5 years for McClintock to finish and publish her results on transposable elements in chromosomes (transposons). She gave numerous presentations on her discoveries and nobody understood - at a time when molecular biology was taking over the field of cytogenetics. This book shows that science is not always objective. It also brings up legitimate points as to whether the prevailing Western view of Science (i.e. the scientific method) is efficient enough in scientific research and discovery.
I highly recommend this book!
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