ABSTRACT
In Barbara McClintock’s work, DNA becomes a cell that interacts with other cells, an organism that does not stand apart from and is not indifferent to its environment, one whose very genetic development is influenced by the factors surrounding it. The metaphysical shift in scientific paradigms that McClintock’s assertion required was initially resisted by the scientific community at large. McClintock’s science calls for relationship as not only an accepted practice but a required principle. McClintock’s singular scientific method also reveals conceptual differences from that of her predecessors. McClintock’s discovery of “transposition” as a means of genetic communication and development reconfigured geneticists’ previous “central dogma” concerning the structure and function of genes. McClintock’s is a vision of cells that reflects a less hierarchically ordered microuniverse that liberates DNA from its authoritarian past and puts it in a more responsive, more cooperative relationship with its cytoplasmic neighbors.
