Comfort sets out in this intellectual biography of Barbara
McClintock to replace the myth of the isolated, misunderstood
victim of masculine bias who failed to win immediate recognition
for her work with a more nuanced and individuated story that
focuses on her actual work, particularly that of her later years.
This carefully researched book pays particular attention to
McClintock's research notes and previously unpublished
correspondence, and it demonstrates a thorough knowledge and
understanding of the science involved...[T]his is the first
full-length, carefully documented, and scientifically informative
study of [McClintock's] life and work, and it is an important
contribution to the history of science, particularly of genetics,
as well as to feminist science and the history of ideas.--M. H.
Chaplin"Choice" (12/01/2001)
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)
Lucid, engaging, and unafraid of controversy, Comfort also
dismantles the popular image of McClintock as a mystic and a female
pioneer marginalized by male scientists. He portrays instead a
highly respected and dedicated professional adamant about
maintaining her personal and intellectual freedom, who possessed an
astonishing attunement to complexity and pattern and a protean
abilityto rapidly solve intricate, multidimensional
problems.--Donna Seaman"Booklist" (06/01/2001)
Nathaniel Comfort's book enhances McClintock's status as one of the
leading geneticists of the twentieth century. Putting aside the
myth of the outsider, he describes how her contributions were
appreciated by her contemporaries, and shows that she was well
supported by colleagues in her search for a congenial work
environment..."The Tangled Field" is set to become the definitive
biography of Barbara McClintock.--Anne Magurran"Times Literary
Supplement" (11/01/2001)
This readable biography of one of the twentieth century's most
important geneticists interweaves fact and insight about McClintock
as both person and scientist. Her discovery of mobile genetic
elements in corn and her efforts to resolve fundamental problems in
biology (development, heredity, and evolution) make her...a rare
visionary.
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