"AN EXTRAORDINARY PERIOD"

Outside the plant breeding shed near Cornell's Ag Quad in 1929 are (standing, from left) researchers Chares R. Burnham and Marcus Rhoades, Professor Rollins A. Emerson, and Barbara McClintock, later a Nobel laureate. Kneeling is George W. Beadle, also to be a Nobel laureate, with Emerson's dog Pudgie.

When Barbara McClintock, whose pioneering work was to win her the Nobel Prize in 1983, completed the only undergraduate genetics course at Cornell in January 1922, she received a phone call inviting her to take the only other such course available at the university -- for graduate students.

"This telephone call cast the die for my future. I remained with genetics thereafter," she later recalled. "... By the time of graduation, I had no doubts about the direction I wished to follow for an advanced degree. It would involve chromosomes and their genetic content and expressions, in short, cytogenetics. This field had just begun to reveal its potentials. I have pursued it ever since. ...

"After completing ... [my] Ph.D. degree in 1927, I remained at Cornell to initiate studies aimed at associating each of the ten chromosomes comprising the maize complement with the genes each carries. A sequence of events [then] occurred of great significance to me. It began with the appearance in the fall of 1927 of George W. Beadle [also to become a Nobel laureate] ... to start studies ...with Professor Rollins A. Emerson. ... In the following fall, Marcus M. Rhoades arrived ... to continue his graduate studies for a Ph.D. degree, also with Professor Emerson. ... The initial association of the three of us, followed subsequently by inclusion of any interested graduate student, formed a close-knit group eager to discuss all phases of genetics, including those being revealed or suggested by our own efforts. The group was self-sustaining in all ways. For each of us this was an extraordinary period. ... The communal experience profoundly affected each one of us. The events recounted above were, by far, the most influential in directing my scientific life."