Barbara McClintock
When she won Nobel Prize in 1983, I was still an elementary school girl in China. Throughout my middle-school and high-school years, her personal story fascinated me. My interest in botany also started at that time. I collect plants and made samples, which covered the walls of my bedroom. I eventually chose genetics as my major in graduate school. In 1953, mainstream science did not accept McClintock's Nobel-winning discovery of transposon elements in maize. She stopped publishing articles about this discovery and switched to studying the race of maize. Throughout the following decades, she traveled to central and south America to identify and grow new corn species. Fortunately, French scientists rediscovered transposon elements in bacteria in the 1960s. Barbara got her credit, and she lived long enough to win a Noble Prize in 1983. Her personal story can easily fit into the category of feminists. Being independent since childhood and interested in botany during high school, she