Feeling for the Organism : The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (10th Anniversary Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Not bad, still some good information
Review: All in all, this was not a bad book. It contained valuable information on the life of Barbara McClintock. For any of you not familiar, she is a geneticist who devoted her life to studying corn plants. She discovered transposable elements (jumping genes) which won her the nobel prize. Her work is inspiring, and this book has fairly good coverage of the details, but not the best. Still one I will add to my library.

Rating:
Summary: Not bad, still some good information
Review: All in all, this was not a bad book. It contained valuable information on the life of Barbara McClintock. For any of you not familiar, she is a geneticist who devoted her life to studying corn plants. She discovered transposable elements (jumping genes) which won her the nobel prize. Her work is inspiring, and this book has fairly good coverage of the details, but not the best. Still one I will add to my library.

Rating:
Summary: I admire Dr. McClintock's courage, spirit and science.
Review: Imagine being devalued simply because you are a woman in a man's career at a time when that made you an oddity. Then imagine having a mind brilliant enough to identify and understand transposable elements at a time when your science is so far ahead of everyone else's work that they cannot understand you or take you seriously. Put those two factors together and imagine how much confidence and courage it took for her to stick with her studies of maize genetics until everyone else caught up with her. Even if you're not interested in her science, you can't read this book and not be inspired by the woman. Dr. McClintock is my hero on many levels.

Rating:
Summary: Informative but hasty, confused attempt to combine genres
Review: This book was recommended to me (a male) by a PhD candidate (female) in enology (wine studies) in response to my locating and handing her a somewhat-difficult-to locate copy of James Watson's admittedly painful-to-read but otherwise sincere memoir of the Cambridge scene surrounding the elucidation of the structure of DNA by two guys and a gal. I searched extensively for the McClintock book, out of loyalty to my friend, read it, and found it enormously informative, lyrically sustaining and theoretically stimulating, but ultimately frustrating as a coherent book because it really wasn't a conscienciously documented biography, its "scientific" diagrams of meiosis/mytosis and the corn cycle were confusing, it mixed basic explanations with unexplained terminology, and its theoretical claims concerning the whole organism weren't really thought through - the alleged necessity of including cytogenetic, holistic evidence was by its own revelations undermined by the conclusion that the self-regulation of genes was entirely genetic, rather than influenced by the cytologic or protein-containing environment. I simply don't know who this book was written for - perhaps "the widest possible audience." Conclusion: this book, full of wonderful anecdote, compelling presentation of genetic theory and its historical development, and terifically stimulating discussion of the nature of scientific and gender-limited communication, is ultimately marred by an apparent impatience to bring it to press (and profitability and reputation-enhancing publication) without due regard to biographical standards, clear integration of tri-partite intent (biography, feminist panegyric, popular science), and fundamental clarity of presentation. I learned from it, but grudgingly.