Barbara McClintock, born #OnThisDay in 1902, was an American scientist whose discovery in the 1940s and ’50s of mobile genetic elements, or “jumping genes,” won her the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1983.

Barbara McClintock, born #OnThisDay in 1902, was an American scientist whose discovery in the 1940s and ’50s of mobile genetic elements, or “jumping genes,” won her the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1983.