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Barbara McClintock (born June 16, 1902, Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.—died September 2, 1992, Huntington, New York) 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. McClintock, whose father was a physician, took great pleasure in science as a child and evidenced early the independence of mind and action that she would exhibit throughout the rest of...