Judith Kinnear
These are names given to specific genetic segments that are capable of movement between chromosomes - the so-called transposable elements whose unique properties are captured by the popular label 'jumping genes'.
Faced with the need recently to prepare a talk for a group of high-achieving undergraduates, I turned to some examples of researchers whose stories might provide interesting exemplars for this student group. Among the references to which I returned was Evelyn Fox Keller's monograph on the life and work of Barbara McClintock: A Feeling for the Organism.
I first became aware of McClintock during my undergraduate days when I had the delightful experience of being taught at Melbourne University by Margaret Blackwood, who shared McClintock's passions for the genetics of maize. This interest was further whetted as a result of my spending sabbatical periods at Cornell University where McClintock (1902-1992) completed her postgraduate studies and began her academic career.
McClintock, a brilliant researcher and now regarded by many as one of the great scientists of this century, received a Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 1983 for her seminal work on mobile genetic elements or transposons. Remarkably this acknowledgment occurred more than thirty years after she had first proposed the existence of 'jumping genes'. So there she was, a Nobel Prize recipient at the age of 81.
As she explored the outcomes of maize crosses in the 1940s, McClintock developed a proposal of transposable elements that lay uncomfortably against the prevailing view that genes occupied fixed locations on chromosomes. When in 1951 McClintock first publicly presented her model of mobile genes and relevant supporting evidence, her views were largely ignored or at best regarded as irrelevant to mainstream genetics, and she was labelled as an eccentric. One of her colleagues is reported to have stated "By God, that woman is either crazy or a genius". The latter view was indeed correct, but its acknowledgment did not occur for many years.
In her book, Fox Keller discusses this breakdown - the audience not hearing McClinock's radical ideas, McClintock not communicating these ideas that were so vivid in her own mind and derived from a deep insight developed over years of seeing patterns in leaf and kernel colours that most people would have regarded as insignificant or minor aberrations. Fox Keller uses the wonderful phrase "a different language" to convey this idea of non-communication. When interviewed much later, McClintock commented: "It was just a surprise that I couldn't communicate". More pointedly, when two other researchers produced findings that supported her original proposal, McClintock stated: "...we were on different levels of thinking - that's where we couldn't communicate."
McClintock's public seminars on mobile genes were received without enthusiasm, her scientific writings were labelled by many as "dense", and in consequence, she ceased her public presentations, reduced her writing for scientific journals and chose instead to share her ideas with a small number of colleagues who were interested in her work. Only much later, when phenomena such as drug resistance in bacteria were explained on the basis of transposable genetic elements, was the significance of McClintock's earlier work recognised.
Effective communication between researchers and their various audiences - be they fellow researchers, funding authorities, grant assessors, students - requires that the researcher and audience share the same "language", at least in part. The extent and speed of acceptance of a new explanatory model depends on a complex of factors. No matter how vivid a concept is in the mind of a researcher, one element influencing its public reception will be that researcher's ability to communicate an idea through a common "language" as well as the openness of the minds of an audience to receive and share that new understanding.
Professor Judith Kinnear is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (International and Development), at the University of Sydney.