Barbara McClintock: A Scientist Who Relied on Intuitive Abilities
In her study of corn, Barbara McClintock blended scientific rigor with intuitive abilities.
Image by Jen Theodore, courtesy of Unsplash
I get excited when I hear about a scientist like Barbara McClintock.
McClintock blended her mystical nature and intuitive abilities with rigorous groundbreaking science.
For me, science starts with curiosity and wonder, delivering structure and certainty. Intuition starts with deep interconnectedness, and the direct knowing it delivers has a structure and certainty of its own.
McClintock’s life as a scientist was popularized in the wonderful book A Feeling For the Organism by Evelyn Fox Keller, who personally interviewed McClintock for the book. It is at once a gripping story of a female scientist making her way in a completely male-dominated field, and an unusual tale of a scientist using her intuitive abilities as a crucial part of her research methodology.
McClintock was an American scientist who studied the cytology of corn (the structure and function of corn cells) during the 1940s and 1950s. She is known for her discovery of “transposition”, a phenomenon that revolutionized our understanding of how the genetic elements of DNA function. Although her contemporaries considered her a rigorous and impeccable scientist, her discovery was not accepted until many years later – with a Nobel Prize in 1983 – partly because of her unorthodox research methods.
Barbara McClintock’s intuitive abilities
As you might guess from the title of the book written about McClintock, she went beyond the scientific method by developing a “feeling” for the organism she was studying. This feeling enabled her to “see” things in new and unexpected ways. Other scientists weren’t able to imitate or understand her method, and they couldn’t see what she saw. But she was able to merge her intuitive insights with the rigor of science by verifying or building upon her insights using the scientific method.
Here is how McClintock felt when she was studying the chromosomes in a mold called Neurospora:
“I found that the more I worked with them the bigger and bigger [they] got, and when I was really working with them I wasn’t outside, I was down there. I was part of the system. I was right down there with them, and everything got big. I even was able to see the internal parts of the chromosomes – actually everything was there. It surprised me because I actually felt as if I were right down there and these were my friends.” -Barbara McClintock
Imagine telling this to your scientific colleagues! Especially the part about the chromosomes feeling like friends.
It’s not as if McClintock simply walked into her lab every day saying “hi” to the chromosomes and asking them to show her something new. To receive new insights, she had to access a particular state of joy or connection. In the above example, she was feeling fear and discouragement because she couldn’t figure out what was going on with the chromosomes. So she went and sat under a Eucalyptus tree and cried for a while. Slowly the negativity left her, and her state of mind shifted to a joyful connection. She was connected with the chromosomes and could “see” them as if she was right down there with them.
McClintock considered herself a mystic. She sensed deeply into the “oneness” of things, going beyond her individual ego to merge with her objects of study. This gave her a direct, intuitive kind of knowing, different from the scientific kind of knowing that results from detached observation and mental analysis. Her intuitive insights occurred before she could put them into words. She couldn’t provide rational explanations for them, but she knew they were correct.
Blending science and intuition
The beauty of McClintock’s story is that she excelled in both scientific and intuitive ways of knowing. She was a detached and objective scientist. And she engaged personally and intimately with her objects of study.
Take a moment to reflect on Barbara McClintock’s research process.
You might be thinking that it’s not possible to be personally engaged with your object of study while also remaining detached enough to practice rigorous science. Or that McClintock’s subjective feelings might have gotten in the way of her ability to see the data objectively.
Well, science used to be heralded as a purely objective practice. But scholars in fields such as sociology and feminist studies are finding that science is not immune to context and subjective bias after all. I believe that our science will be stronger if we delve deeply into our contexts and biases, taking responsibility for how they affect our scientific process.
McClintock did not deny that she was personally engaged with her object of study. She was “friends” with the chromosomes, and she was willing to expand her mind to see the unexpected things they showed her. But it was her scientific understanding that gave her the framework to understand these communications. And it was her rigorous scientific training that allowed her to step back and question her own insights, to follow them up with further testing.
Imagine the immense possibilities of a research methodology in which our object of study becomes our “friend” and works together with us in our scientific exploration. Imagine that instead of imposing our human goals and values on a passive nature, we could follow McClintock’s example and re-imagine science as a collaborative process that integrates both analytical and intuitive ways of knowing.
