[Music] some of the most important principles in modern genetics were either discovered proven or first conceived of by a woman who you have never heard of who spent 40 years of her life studying corn more than 20 years before Watson and Crick identified the structure of DNA Barbara mlto was inventing the field of cytogenetics the study of the structure and function of chromosomes in 1931 through her pioneering microscopic techniques she was the first to prove that genes were physically located on chromosomes she did that by being the first to also show that chromosomes swap bits
of genetic information by crossing over when sex cells are formed this crossover is one of the most important aspects of reproduction because it explains why sex cells from the same individuals can produce offspring that are different from each other in the 1940s mlto focused on the puzzling color patterns of Indian BN she wondered why some kernels were white and some were Brown and some were purple and some were white with speckles it was thought at the time that the speckled Kels were mutated white ones but no one could figure out what caused the mutation so
after breeding inhuman numbers of maze plants over many generations she realized that the only way that this could happen is if sections of the plant's genome moved from one location to another sometimes Landing smack dab in the middle of a Jee for color making the colonel look like it lost a paintball tournament in this way mlto discovered what we now call transposable elements or jumping genes turns out that there are stretches of DNA and pretty much every type of organism that can move one location to another and it's one of the most important sources of
genetic mutations including in humans being a lady scientist in the 1940s though meant that you couldn't do face blisteringly awesome science and receive proper recognition maybe she should have been baking cakes her Discovery when it wasn't ignored was ridiculed but she kept researching and she did a little more genetic pioneering like in 1951 when she discovered that genes were silenced when stuff in a cell's nucleus later discovered to be enzymes covered them up mlto eventually got so tired of the ridicule that her ideas received that she stopped publishing her research it wasn't until the 1970s
when scientists could actually observe the processes mlto described that they felt bad for being such patronizing ass faces so in 1983 35 years after she published her first paper on TR position Barbara mclintoch was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for her discovery of mobile genetic elements and she Remains the only woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in that category thank you for watching this episode of saow if you enjoyed please go to youtube.com/ sow And subscribe if you have any ideas or questions or comments please leave them on Facebook or Twitter
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