Nancy Grace Roman, NASA Chief of Astronomy and "Mother of Hubble"

 

Nancy Grace Roman, linocut, 11" x 14" on Japanese paper by Ele Willoughby, 2026

This is a hand-carved and hand-printed lino block print portrait of trail-blazing astronomer Nancy Grace Roman (1925-2018), NASA's first chief of astronomy throughout the 1960s and 1970s, who helped shape NASA's space astronomy program. Nicknamed the "mother of Hubble" for her role in planning the revolutionary Hubble Space Telescope, she was active in science communication and an advocate for women in science throughout her career. Recently, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope was renamed the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in recognition of her enduring contributions to astronomy, and launched August 30, 2026. 

Born in Nashville, Nancy came by her love of school and science honestly from her music teacher mother Georgia Frances Smith Roman and physicist and mathematician father Irwin Roman. Her father got an oil industry geophysics job and moved the family to Oklahoma when Nancy was only 3 months old. His job also brought them to Texas, New Jersey, Michigan (where the dark night skies allowed her mother to show her the constellations and northern lights), and, when he joined the Civil Service as a geophysicist in 1936, to Nevada. The frequent moves meant that Nancy had to repeatedly work on her own to catch up with her new class and curriculum and that she did not have a lot of chance to make close friends. The next year, when Nancy was about 12, her father was hired as Senior Geophysicist at the Baltimore office of the U.S. Geological Survey, and Nancy started an astronomy club with her classmates so they could learn the constellations. By the 7th grade, she knew she would be an astronomer. She completed an accelerated program at Western High School in Baltimore, graduating in only 3 years. She never had a telescope but read every book on astronomy in the Baltimore library. As a girl, her science interests were not encouraged; when she requested a second year of algebra instead of taking Latin, her guidance counsellor "looked down her nose at me and sneered, 'What kind of lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?' That was the sort of reception I got most of the way”, Nancy recalled. But because the US entered the war, Nancy got the chance to substitute a summer of chemistry for her senior year of high school and started college early. 

 

Nancy went to Swarthmore, where she said of the dean of women "if you insisted on majoring in science or engineering, she wouldn't have anything more to do with you" but she did refer her to the astronomy department. The chair Peter van de Kamp tried to discourage her from this path but did teach her astronomy. She was able to work with two previously defunct student telescopes which gave her a feel for instruments and instrumentation and let her have "the fun of playing around with observing techniques." In her second year she began working at Swarthmore's Sproul Observatory processing astronomical photographic plates. Van de Kamp gave her a solo lecture on astrometry, which studies the precise positions and movements of celestial bodies and was his field of expertise. He suggested she learn about professional astronomy from the astronomical library. She recalls the only encouragement she got was from the Physics Department head who said, "I usually try to discourage girls from going into physics, but I think maybe you might make it." When she graduated in February 1946, Van de Kamp recommended she pursue graduate studies at the University of Chicago, which was rebuilding its astronomy department after the war. 

By March she was enrolled and finding classes easier than those at Swarthmore, so she asked three professors, Otto Struve, George van Biesbroeck, and William Wilson Morgan, for extra projects to help her decide what she would like to focus on for her thesis. Biesbroeck asked her to solve the orbit of a double-star. Struve gave her a couple of interesting stellar spectra to analyse. Morgan's observational project using a 12 inch (30 cm) telescope expanded into her thesis. The first time she meet her supervisor Morgan he asked her to go to his house and change the bed because his wife was sick, a task he would never have asked a male student. Surprised and flummoxed, she acquiesced. Professors complained about teaching women whom they assumed would quit to get married. Morgan was not encouraging and at one point did not even speak to her to say hello for six months. Nevertheless, she got the guidance Morgan neglected to offer from visiting scientists Bengt Stromgren and Adriaan Blaauw and she succeeded in completing her doctorate on the Ursa Major Moving Group in 1949. The stars in Ursa Major featured in my portrait, are bright remnants of a now scattered cluster; she found 200 stars that had left the Dipper at the same time, and knowing their distances from geometry she was able to determine their actual intrinsic brightnesses. This was an improvement on getting intrinsic brightness from their spectra. The night before her defence, Morgan who typically worked late, insisted on meeting her at midnight and "decided to use it as an occasion for petting"; she moved his hand several times and tried to continue their conversation. Mercifully he did not try this again. Since the disinterested Morgan was unable to tell other faculty how her research was going, they had assumed she wasn't working and were surprised when she had no trouble defending her thesis. While in graduate school she also began a life-long association with the American Association of University Women (AAUW). 

She spent two months at Warner and Swasey Observatory, in Cleveland, before agreeing to be Morgan's research associate at Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. During her six years there she was able to visit the University of Chicago's McDonald Observatory in Texas for four months every year. When the position ended she was employed as an instructor and then assistant professor. As was typical at the time her salary was less than two thirds of a similarly qualified male. Department Chair and Nobel laureate Subramanyan Chandrasekhar (whom had certainly been subject of racial discrimination, but unable to recognize sexual discrimination) told her, "We don't discriminate against women - we can just get them for less." She made a study of naked-eye visible stars and noticed that the proportion of elements heavier than helium (that astronomers call metals) varied; those with stronger metal lines moved in more circular orbits closer to the galactic centre and plane of the Milky Way, and those with weaker lines moved more elliptically and further away. Younger stars are made from the expelled nuclear remnants of exploded stars that had built up heavier metals over their lifetime and then gone nova. So younger stars are more metal-rich. Older, redder, less metal-rich stars had slower, more elliptical and inclined orbits than the bluer metal-rich younger stars moving in circular orbits and sticking close to the galactic plane as they form. This gave some of the first clues about the formation of the Galaxy. Her 1950 paper was selected as one of most important 100 papers of the century in Astrophysical Journal. She then looked at star colours and spectra and found that since more of the metal lines are in the violet and UV, stars with weaker metals were slightly bluer in the UV than their colours in the red would suggest. This "UV excess" proved an easier way to distinguish the metallicity of stars and is still a useful tool. I allude to this work and later research in the stellar spectrum (at the blue end) illustrated on her shirt in my portrait. These she considered her two most important discoveries. Morgan tried to take credit for her work, though he had not been involved. Her research was very impactful and amongst the most highly-cited papers of the time, including, in 1950, three top-100 papers in a single year, with over 3,000 citations. But she was dubious of her ability to get a tenure as a woman, at an institution which could support her research. She turned down positions at Wayne State University and the University of Southern California, because they could not offer access to astronomical instrumentation she needed. She was able to use a new astrometry device for measuring photographic plates at the Argonne National Laboratory, but Yerkes would not acquire one. Likewise when she argued in 1954, they should acquire a digital computer for data analysis, still novel at the time, the department chair Chandrasekhar declared computers not useful for this purpose! While studying stars at different Galactic latitudes during her visit to the David Dunlap Observatory in Toronto she noted one which was not sun-like as expected. She thought she must have made an error and so she checked it again when she returned to Yerkes.  She had discovered that the emission spectrum of the star AG Draconis had completely changed from earlier observations. She called it a stroke of luck; this star is only in this altered state 2 to 3% of the time. This observation raised her profile. She published her new "spectral types, photoelectric magnitudes and colors, and spectroscopic parallaxes for about 600 high-velocity stars," in 1955 as part of the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. She also published on the detection of exoplanets. 

She met a Scottish postdoc and fell in love. Since it would have been a challenge to find two astronomy positions in the same place, she considered giving up astronomy to marry, but their relationship did not work out. His fellowship required him to go to a commonwealth country and he found a position in Australia. They wrote regularly for a few years but it was not to be. A couple of years later she was surprised by a proposal of marriage from a man with whom she had not spent a great deal of time alone; she considered it seriously but turned him down. They remained friends until he died.

Knowing the university had never appointed a woman to the academic staff she decided to move on. Morgan wanted her to stay and deliberately did not inform her of job openings but another faculty member, Gerard Kuiper had recommended to her a position and the Naval Research Laboratories in the new field of radio astronomy. She enjoyed teaching but did not want to only be a teacher, so decided government science might be her best bet. She moved to Washington, D.C. and remained there for the rest of her life. She found women were better tolerated, and better paid in government science. She spent three years at NRL, where she worked on radio astronomy, using radio astronomy for geodesy, the propagation of sound in water, and became head of the microwave spectroscopy section of the radio astronomy program. She mapped the Milky Way at 440 MHz. She also consulted on the Project Vanguard satellite program, which introduced her to space astronomy. Because of her observation of the unexpected spectra of AG Draconis, she was invited to speak in Armenia, then part of the Soviet Union, in 1956 for the dedication of the Byurakan Observatory, making her the first civilian to visit since the Cold War. NRL leaders were very interested and this and it lead to higher profile and a series of invitations to give astronomy lectures back home. Most of the science section at NASA came from NRL, so they knew Roman. She attended a talk at the newly-formed NASA by Harold Urey, where Jack Clark asked her if knew anyone interested in starting a space astronomy program there; she took that as an invitation to apply. She was offered the job, and accepted in 1959 even though she suspected a management position would mean giving up research because "the chance to start with a clean slate to map out a program that I thought would influence astronomy for fifty years was more than I could resist." 

Dr. Nancy Grace Roman is shown with a model of the Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO) in 1962 (NASA)

She found her time at NRL had taught her how to work with engineers and translate between the engineers and scientists, which proved very useful at NASA. In the beginning there was no bureaucracy and plenty of funding. She recalled asking the grant office about a certain idea and being told, "Don't ask me what you ca do. Tell me what you want to do. It is up to be to find a way." She was put in charge of the Orbiting Solar Observatories (both the OSO 1 satellite in the top left and a model of the Advanced Orbiting Solar Observatory or AOSO in her hand are part of my portrait), worked on the first gamma-ray telescope, as well as their existing work on geodesy and relativity. As early as 1959 she suggested a space telescope could be used for exoplanet detection, and even suggested a technique employing a rotated coronagraphic mask to block the direct light from stars to resolve bodies which might otherwise been obscured by the glare, as was ultimately used by the Hubble Space Telescope and will soon be used by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. In 1960, she was made the first Chief of Astronomy in NASA's Office of Space Science, and the first woman to hold a NASA executive position. She gave lectures to introduce astronomers to the program and to meet with astronomers to find out what they wanted to research from space. As surprising as it may be today, astronomers were initially skeptical of what NASA could do for their field. She decided that NASA should manage major astronomy projects to benefit the wider scientific community rather than individual projects by scientists. She wrote in 1960, "A fundamental part of all of these plans is the participation of the entire astronomical community. NASA will act as a coordinating agency to enable astronomers to obtain the basic observations they need from outer space." Until peer-review was introduced in 1970, Roman alone judged the merit of all proposals and distributed the science budget. She lead the orbiting astronomical observatories program. The learning curve was steep. The first in a series of optical and ultraviolet telescopes was four years behind schedule and failed three days after reaching orbit in 1966. The OAO-2 launched in 1968 was the first successful space telescope and the OAO-3 Copernicus was very successful from 1972-1981. NASA learned that unforeseen technical problems were inevitable and that it was wise to keep launch dates classified. She oversaw astronomical satellites Uhuru (1970), the gamma-ray telescope Small Astronomy Satellite 2 (1972), x-ray telescope Small Astronomy Satellite 3 (1975), geodetic satellites, the Astronomy Rocket Program, the Scout Probe to measure the relativistic gravity redshift, and experiments on Spacelab, Gemini, Apollo and Skylab. She set up NASA’s scientific ballooning program and the airborne astronomy program starting with a 12 inch (30 cm) telescope on a Learjet in 1968 and the Kuiper Airborne Observatory with a 36 inch (91 cm) telescope on Lockheed C-141A Starlifter jet. She was skeptical it would pass review, but the Cosmic Background Explorer mission began during her tenure, and its results lead to the 2006 Nobel Prize for its leading scientists, as did the Infrared Astronomy Satellite, overseen by Nancy Boggess. She was most proud of the International Ultraviolet Explorer. She fought to collaborate internationally with the UK’s Science and Engineering Research Council and the European Space Agency saying, "IUE was an uphill fight. I don't mean I didn't have some support, but I think I carried it on almost single handedly.” 

Henrietta Swan Leavitt, 9.5" x 12.5" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2010 

She is most famous for her last major program, the Large Space Telescope which has since been named the Hubble Space Telescope. Though quick to share credit with her many colleagues, Nancy Grace Roman was known as the “mother of Hubble.” Getting above the atmosphere avoids the distortions it causes and allows astronomers to observe a much wider range of frequencies (which otherwise would be filtered out by the atmosphere). A large mirror is required to collect enough light from dim and distant objects. First proposed in 1946 by Lyman Spitzer, the possibility of a 3 m space telescope became more feasible in the 60s with the development of the Saturn V rocket. Roman chose to focus first on the small telescopes of OAO as proof-of-concept for the deployment and remote operation of space telescopes. Some astronomers argued for a moon-based telescope but Roman felt logistics, including the lunar dust were insurmountable. Colleagues from NASA’s Langley Research Center argued for space telescopes with human operators, but Roman considered that absurdly complicated. People need atmospheres to breathe, and the atmosphere was precisely what they were hoping to avoid. But with the success of the OAO she began lecturing on the possibility of a large space telescope. In 1969 NASA commissioned a report from the National Science Foundation which endorsed the idea. With astronomer Charles Robert O'Dell, hired in 1972 to be the Project Scientist, she was the driving force behind the project and developed the standard process by which NASA operates large astronomical projects. She set up the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) to run mission science operations. As the design process continued engineers requested a smaller mirror for technical reasons; Roman argued for a 2.4 m minimum size in order to accurately resolve Cepheid Variables in Virgo. Edwin Hubble had shown that the speed at which distant galaxies recede was proportional to distance, but the proportionality constant was not well determined. Henrietta Swan Leavitt had shown that luminosity of the class of stars called Cepheid Variables was a function of their period of variation. This let astronomers calibrate their distance in the Milky Way, and so if they could resolve these stars in Virgo, they could determine its distance. After convincing NASA and the astronomical community she next tackled policy makers, writing testimony for Congress throughout the 1970s to continue to justify the telescope and convince them to fund it. She invested in detector technology and served on the selection board for Hubble’s science operations. She argued that for the price of a trip to the movies every American would have 15 years of exciting discoveries, to justify the large price tag. Costs ultimately ran much higher, but the Hubble Space Telescope more than doubled this lifespan. Goddard wanted control of the STScI and Hubble science operations but Nancy sided with the astronomical community that it should be their hands; this nearly cost her job and lead to her retirement. 

Roman, posing here in 1966 with a model of the observatory that would become the Hubble Space Telescope (NASA)

She took early retirement in 1979 so she could care for her elderly mother (until her death in 1992), but remained as a consultant for a year while selection of the STScI continued. Interested in programming she audited a FORTRAN course and became a consultant for ORI, Inc. from 1980 to 1988, supporting research on geodesy and astronomical catalogues. 

Hubble was scheduled to be flown on the Space Shuttle flight after Challenger; then the Challenger disaster lead to a three year delay. NASA chose to redesign payloads for robotic deployment but Hubble was too far along in its design. It was quite lucky that it could be serviced by the Space Shuttle, which allowed its initial mirror problem to be fixed and later for instruments to be sporadically upgraded, greatly increasing its abilities and lifetime. 

This in turn lead to her becoming head of the Astronomical Data Center NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 1995 and working with contractors supporting it until 1997. She spent three years training K-12 science teachers including those for underserved districts and spent ten years recording astronomy textbooks for Reading for the Blind and Dyslexic until her mid-eighties. In 1962 she was awarded with the Federal Women's Award (introduced in 1961 when they realized that the major awards for civil servants were restricted to men) by John F. Kennedy, and was selected as one of Life Magazine's 100 Most Important Young People. She received four honorary doctorates (including one from Swarthmore), NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Award (1969), NASA's Outstanding Scientific Leadership Award (1978), the American Astronomical Society's William Randolf Lovelace II Award and Asteroid 2516 was named in her honour.  She was frequently recognized for her achievements and her support for women in STEM, but described her 2017 inclusion in the LEGO Women of NASA set as “by far the most fun.” She died in 2018 after a long illness.

References
 Nancy Grace Roman, Wikipedia, accessed October 2, 2026

Dr. Nancy Grace Roman (1925-2018), NASA website https://science.nasa.gov/people/nancy-roman/, accessed October 4, 2026

Hyman, Randall. How Vera Rubin and Nancy Grace Roman Transformed Astronomy. Astronomy.com, November 30, 2022. 

Roman, Nancy Grace. Nancy Grace Roman and the Dawn of Space Astronomy, Annu. Rev. Astron. Atrophy's., 2019, 57: 1-34.

See also: Nancy Grace Roman, The Mother of Hubble - Media Resources, Scientific Visualization Studio, NASA

Brains and Buckmoths

A couple more new prints I made for #SciArtSeptember are 'Amygdala' and 'Bogbean Buckmoth' which I made for the almond (shape) and silk prompts respectively. Did you know that amygdala literally means almond-shaped? I did not, but it inspired my print. 

Amygdala, 8" x10" cyanotype print, by Ele Willoughby, 2026

This one of a kind cyanotype on water colour paper has an image of an open source brain MRI with the amygdala highlighted in gold. The amygdala is a paired nuclear complex in the cerebral hemispheres of our brains (and those of other vertebrates). Part of the limbic system, the amygdala has a primary role in the processing of memory, decision-making, and emotional responses (including fear, anxiety, and aggression) but also plays a role in things like social communication and understanding. 

The Bogbean Buckmoth is an endangered giant silk moth, here in Ontario.

Bogbean Buckmoth, 8" x 8" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2026

This is a hand-printed lino block print of the endangered Bogbean Buckmoth (Hemileuca sp.). It is printed by hand in dark brown, black and rusty-orange in on lovely Japanese washi (or mulberry) paper, 8" x 8".

A day flying silk moth and the only buckmoth (Hemileuca) in eastern Canada, the Bogbean Buckmoth is very distinct with its black and white wings with eyespots and its black body with both white and rusty orange markings on the thorax and abdomen. It is a medium-sized moth with forewing lengths of 26–32 mm for males and 32–36 mm for females. Bogbean Buckmoth populations are known only from eastern Ontario and New York; it is listed as endangered in both jurisdictions. It only lives in open, chalky, low shrub fens containing large amounts of bogbean, an emergent wetland flowering plant which is the primary food of its larvae along with bog cranberry. Though the adults can fly for several kilometres they rarely leave the region around their home in the fens, increasing their isolation.

The Bogbean Buckmoth has a one-year life cycle. These moths spend the winter as eggs and emerge as larvae (black with reddish-orange branched spines along the back) the next spring, becoming adults in mid- to late September.

Here in Ontario they are threatened by habitat loss and changes like water level fluctuations, land development, pesticide use and climate change and its impact on wetlands. Also, its preferred food, the bogbean, is threatened by invasive plants, especially the European Common Reed and Narrow-leaved Cattail.

Pollinators by moonlight and in the garden

Still enjoying playing with cyanotype combined with linocut. Here are a couple of recent ones where I combined a moon cyanotype with varies plants and linocuts of insects.

Moon, moths and lanternfly. 11" x 14" cyanotype and linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2026

Moon, plants, moths and butterfly 11" x 14" cyanotype and linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2026

September is a busy #scicomm month with the Mineral Cup (which you can catch on bluesky or mastodon) and SciArtSeptember. If you've been following along, some of my art that I am sharing daily will be familiar. I also made a brand new linocut for the prompt ruby: a male ruby-throated hummingbird with Canada columbine. 

Ruby-throated hummingbird, 8" x 8" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2026

Cyanotype and Sun Prints

 

Hummingbird clearwing moth and Karner blue butterfly with lily of the valley cyanotype, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2026

I've been making more cyanotype experiments, combining them with linocut and other types of sun prints and playing with shapes. 

Tree of Heaven and Fern Cyanotype with Sun Print, by Ele Willoughby, 2026

Bumblebee cyanotype, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2026

Cat cyanotype with Virginia creeper cyanotype, by Ele Willoughby, 2026

Foxtail Barley cyanotype, 5" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 
2026

Alliums and Dandelions Cyanotype, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2026

Skeleton, Fern and Wild Carrot Cyanotype, 11"  x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2026

Lily pads cyanotype and sun print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2026

Barbara McClintock asking the maize plant to solve specific problems

Barbara McClintock, linocut print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2026

I first read about Barbara McClintock years ago in 'Nobel Prize Women in Science' by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne. McClintock was one of the women portrayed who did actually win the award, rather than the several who should arguably have been included in various wins. Much more recently, I read 'The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT and the Fight for Women in Science', by Kate Zernike. When I was an undergraduate and then graduate student in physics at University of Toronto, and served on the Gender Issues Committee, biologist Nancy Hopkins famously showed systemic discrimination against women faculty at MIT with hard data, gathered systematically, if surreptitiously, by literally measuring lab floor space. Her victory was all our victory, because she used the tools of science to convince scientists. Further, she and collaborators showed academics worldwide a strong, convincing, simple and effective strategy for showing discrimination was occurring. For instance, in 2002, the University of Toronto settled a class action suit from retired female faculty, acknowledging gender barriers and pay discrimination. The book is well-written, but I found it a bit hard to read. Barriers and discrimination Hopkins experienced in the 60s onwards, felt all too familiar for my experiences decades later. Further, as a physics student, one of a grand total of 2 women specialists as a undergrad, and as an obvious minority as a grad student, with a grand total of 0 then 1 female faculty, it was pretty undeniable that something was wrong and needed fixing. It took Hopkins, wary of feminism like many of her generation, a very long time to recognize she was facing discrimination and harassment. I found it rather hard to read about naive young Nancy who took so long to question things.

Roaslind Franklin, linocut, 11" x 14", by Ele Willoughby 2020

One of Hopkins' role models, somewhat hidden in the background was Barbara McClintock, who tried resolutely to recruit her. Young Nancy was a bit wary of McClintock whom she viewed as a bit of a square peg, maybe sidelined from the cutting edge of genetics unlike her undergraduate mentor Nobel laureate James Watson. She was both right and quite wrong, as it turned out. Outsider McClintock would go on to win the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. It was funny to read about Watson's role as champion and mentor in Nancy's life, knowing him more as a bit of a villain, not so much in Rosalind Franklin's life (as he is often portrayed with imprecision and hindsight), but as a villain in the story of what was and was not remembered about Franklin posthumously until more recently. Also, he has become increasingly notorious for ugly racist and sexist biases about people. Nancy was important to a lot of us women in science in the early 2000s, well beyond biology, for the way she spearheaded the survey of lab space offered women versus men faculty at MIT and gathered hard data of systemic biases. When Nancy was the first person to read Jim Watson's 'Selfish Gene', it did not occur to her that maybe the portrayal of Franklin as uptight harridan might not be the whole story or to wonder why this was the first time she had heard of her. When Watson told Nancy that McClintock was "difficult" she believed him. When McClintock showed Nancy a letter in which she had been described as the best person in the field and that it was a shame that she (McClintock) couldn't be hired because she was a woman, Nancy assumed the problem and McClintock's science both were a thing of the past. But what did come through to me in reading this book was how, all the while, Barbara McClintock was doing her own thing, quietly revolutionary on her own terms. Barbara was there supporting fellow women in science and understood the dynamics of gender in the scientific workplace before Nancy. 

Barbara McClintock (1902-1992) was a cytologist and geneticist who studied maize genetics from graduate school through retirement. She had been named Eleanor when she was born the third of four children to British immigrant in Connecticut, Thomas Henry McClintock, a homeopathic physician, and his upper-middle-class, Mayflower-descendent Boston wife, housewife, artist and poet, Sara Handy McClintock. When she was young, her parents decided that Eleanor was too delicate and feminine and did not suit their solitary, active, independent child, so they renamed her Barbara. To help save money while her father established his medical practice, and relive her mother of caring for both a toddler Barbara and her new infant younger brother, Barbara was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in Brooklyn from the age of three until she began school. She was close with her father but had a difficult relationship with her mother from a young age.

From her uncle she learned to repair machinery and love nature. Her father raised her as a boy, giving her boxing gloves at age four. When a neighbour who disapproved of the athletic child who didn't play like a girl and tried to teach her "womanly" things, her mother told her to mind her own business. She played sports with the boys, but felt they merely tolerated her as a girl. When Barbara found a teacher "emotionally ugly" her parents let her stay home from school. She grew up with a sense of freedom.

Her family moved to Brooklyn in 1908, where Barbara completed high school in 1919, and discovered her love of science. She wanted to continue to Cornell's College of Agriculture but her mother did not want to allow it. She worried Barbara would become unmarriageable, a not uncommon attitude at the time. Mrs. McClintock had convinced Barbara's older sister to reject a scholarship to Vassar. Her father returned from France where he was serving in the army medical corps just in time to intercede on Barbara's behalf, and she managed to register just before the deadline. 

Barbara thrived at college, participating in student government and joining a sorority (though she later broke her sorority pledge). Her friend circle were avant-guard, and most of her women friends were Jewish at a time when there was a large social gap between Jews and Gentiles at Cornell. She studied Yiddish, and when she found her friends were not welcome in sororities she rejected her own bid. She took up jazz music, playing tenor banjo in a group until the late hours began to interfere with her work. A 1921 field course taught by C.B. Hutchinson first peaked her interest in genetics, a brand new field of study. Hutchinson had been impressed and telephoned to invite her take the new graduate course in genetics the next year. She would later say, "Obviously, this telephone call cast the die for my future. I remained with genetics thereafter." She got her undergraduate degree in 1923, her MSc in 1925 and PhD in 1927, all officially in botany, though her graduate work focused on the cytogenetics of maize. Though just a petite younger woman grad student in pants and a man's shirt working with men in the fields and the lab, she was instrumental in assembling a group of plant breeders and cytologists working on maize cytogenetics, including her champion Marcus Rhoades, future Nobel laureate George Beadle and Harriet Creighton, and this group was supported by department head Rollins A. Emerson (who had rediscovered the laws of inheritance established by Mendel). The group remained close friends and allies through their careers. She worked as research assistant to botanists Lowell Fitz Randolph and Lester W. Sharp. She focused on ways to visualize and characterize maize chromosomes (packages of DNA carrying its genetic material). She was the first to show the 10 maize chromosomes using a staining method she developed using carmine looking at cells from the microspore rather than the root tip, effectively scooping her own supervisor who had been working for years on more effective way to image the maize chromosomes. She studied the morphology of chromosomes and was actually able to link chromosome groups to inherited traits.

Every visit home, her mother tried to convince her not to go back, afraid she would become a professor rather than a housewife. Barbara decided she was too independent for emotional relationships, that she was a "dominant person" who would make a man miserable. She broke up with her beau and remained single for the rest of her life. Zernike writes that she "nurtured a vision of herself as gender-free - feeling at home neither as a girl nor a boy - and once complained of her body as 'a nuisance'."*

She was the first to describe the cross-shaped interaction of the set of maternal and paternal chromosomes that pair up (called homologous chromosomes) during meiosis (cell division of germ cells). Together with Harriet Creighton in the 1930s, studying meiosis in corn cells and examining the gene positions on the chromosomes, she discovered that new combinations of nucleotides that make up DNA in offspring were related to the event of crossing. This proved inter-chromosomal genetic recombination, previously only a hypothesis. They published in 1931, only a few months before Curt Stern published the same observation for fruit flies. This landmark paper made her reputation. They went on to observe how the recombination was linked with new offspring traits. McClintock's chromosomal map was consistent with the linkage map published by her supervisor Hutchinson in 1921, and made a basis of her work with Creighton. They also showed that crossing-over occurs in sister chromatids (which occur when chromosomes are copied by DNA and tied together by a centromere). 

Her success and the importance of her publications lead to receiving several National Research Council post-doctoral fellowships and she continued her research at Cornell, the University of Missouri and the California Institute of Technology, driving her model A Ford across the country. She was the first woman postdoc at Caltech, which required the board of trustees' approval. After a visit to the faculty club on her first day, unlike every other visiting scholar, she was never welcomed again. Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation deemed her "more boy than girl." It was very hard to find a permanent position during the Great Depression. In Missouri in 1931 and 1932, Stadler introduced her using x-rays as a mutagen; greatly increasing the rate of mutation above background levels was a very useful tool in genetic studies. She found ring chromosomes (where the ends of a single radiation-damaged chromosome fuse), which were first reported by Mikhail Sergeevich Navashin, in x-ray-mutagenized maize. She correctly inferred that normally, undamaged chromosomes must have a structure on the chromosome tip to ensure stability, eventually identified as telomeres. She showed that the loss of ring-chromosomes at meiosis caused variegation in subsequent maize generations due to chromosomal deletion. On chromosome 6, she demonstrated the presence of the nucleolus organizer region needed for the assembly of the nucleolus (the largest structure in the cell nucleus). She found that cells can be damaged during non-homologous recombination (the repair of double-strand breaks in DNA) and published this in 1933. 

She earned a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship which allowed her to work in Germany with Richard B. Goldschmidt director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for six months, but she left due to mounting political tensions there. Emerson hired her as an assistant in his Department of Plant Breeding at Cornell for three years and her work there lead to an offer of an assistant professorship from Lewis Stadler at the Department of Botany at the University of Missouri in 1936. There she continued her work on the effect of x-rays on maize cytogenetics. She found breakage and fusion in irradiated maize chromosomes and found spontaneous breakage in endosperm cells from some plants. She made a key cytogenetic discovery of a breakage-rejoining-bridge cycle. During mitosis (cell splitting) the broken chromatids were rejoined after chromosome replication. In anaphase (when replicated chromosomes are split), the broken chromosomes formed a bridge which was broken when the chromatids moved toward cell poles. These broken ends rejoined in the interphase (just prior to) the next mitosis, causing massive mutations which she could observe as variegation of the endosperm. In 1938 she published a cytogenetic analysis on the centromere, describing its organization, function and ability to divide. While her research was going well, and she was gaining recognition (she was elected vice-president of the Genetics Society of America in 1939) she was not happy at Missouri. She felt her "maverick" ways did not fit with what was expected of a "lady scientist." Whether it was wearing pants, allowing her students to work in the field after hours or simply climbing the fence when she forgot her key, she did not fit. When another woman named Barbara McClintock announced her engagement in the newspaper, she was hauled into her boss' office and told she would be fired if she married. She was excluded from faculty meetings, not told of advertised professorships elsewhere and convinced she would never be get tenure, so she decided to leave. She learned that if Stadler, who had hired her, moved to the University of California, her job would be in jeopardy. She took a leave of absence in 1941 and accepted a visiting professor at Columbia, where Rhoades was now teaching. Rhoades also offered to share his research field at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research institution funded by the Carnegie Institution of Washington on Long Island. She loved working the lab and said, "I was just so interested in what I was doing I could hardly wait to get up in the morning and get at it." In December, acting director Drosophila expert Milislav Demerec of the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Genetics at Cold Spring Harbor offered her a temporary position there and then, when made Director he offered her a permanent position. She wavered at first but accepted and became a permanent member of staff in 1942. She had found the right fit, somewhere everyone wore jeans, teaching was not required and there were no restrictions on research.

Esther Lederberg, linocut print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2026. Esther Lederberg also worked at Cold Spring Harbor and published on N. crassa in the early 40s.

There she used the breakage-rejoining-bridge cycle to map new genes. In 1944 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, only the third woman to be elected. George Beadle invited her to visit Stanford and work on the bread mold Neurospora crassa. He had used N. crassa to demonstrate the one gene one enzyme relationship and within two months McClintock had described its number of chromosomes (or karyotype) and its entire life cycle.  Beadle said, "Barbara, in two months at Stanford, did more to clean up the cytology of Neurospora than all other cytological geneticist had done in all previous time on all forms of mold." In 1945 she was elected president of the Genetics Society of America. All of this she achieved before her Nobel award winning work.

Summer grad students at Cold Spring Harbor would play baseball in the evening, next to Barbara's cornfields. One of them, James Watson, said the ball went all too often into her fields and she would "get pretty mad... like your mother". Little did he know at the time that her cornfields would tell a much more complex story of the operation of genes than could be found in the structure of DNA alone. McClintock could be prickly and Watson also called her "the Katharine Hepburn of science."

She began her systematic study of mosaicism in maize in the summer of 1944 investigating the mechanisms of colour patterns and unstable inheritance. She had noted that colour patterns were too unstable over the generations to be explained by simple mutations. She discovered two dominant genetic loci she called Dissociation (Ds) because it could cause a dissociation (or break) and Activator (Ac) which was like a sort of switch. She found that corn colours, dominant or recessive were turned on or off by Ds. Strikingly, Ds could change position, or transpose, within the chromosomes, disrupting the colour gene. In a few cells it can jump again. The jumping is random, so multicoloured corn is common. She found that Ac terminated the transposition of Ds; the amount of jumping around done by Ds is determined by the numbers of copies of Ac in the cell. Ds had other varying effects on neighbouring genes, like making normally stable mutations unstable, if Ac was present. Then in 1948 she made the unexpected observation that both Ds and Ac could change position, or transpose, on the chromosome. Hence they are now known as transposons. 

By carefully controlling crosses, and observing the colouration patterns in generations of crops and careful microscopic analysis, she was able to describe the relationship between Ds and Ac. She saw that Ac controls how Ds jumps from chromosomes 9, and that when it does the chromosome breaks. Ds which suppresses the aleurone protein colour gene prior to transposition, and releases it when it jumps, resulting in pigment synthesis in cells. The Ds jumps are random, and may happen in some cells and not in others, so colour mosaicism is common in maize. The size of coloured spots depends on the stage of development at dissociation. She called Ds and Ac "controlling units" or "controlling elements" to distinguish them from genes and hypothesized that this gene regulation could explain how multicellular life with a single genome can produce cells of  different functions. Thus the genome was not simply a static set of instructions - dogma at the time. In 1950, she published "The origin and behaviour of mutable loci in maize" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and presented a paper of the same name the next year at the annual Cold Spring Harbor symposium. These described this research, the instability due to Ac, or both Ds and Ac in four genes and how those genes can unpredictably revert to the wild phenotype. She also explained there were "families" of transposons which did not interact with each other. She described her colleagues' response to this work as "puzzlement, even hostility," and said, "They thought I was crazy, absolutely mad," but she persisted with her research and published a subsequent paper in Genetics in 1953 about her statistical data and lectured on the work through the 50s. She found another element she called Suppressor-mutator (Spm) for which some versions could transpose on their own and some could not but which, when present, fully rather than partially suppressed mutant genes. McClintock worried she would alienate her colleagues if she continued to publish on controlling elements, so after 1953, she stopped. She felt the need to wait until the field was ready for conceptual change. When she presented her observation that maize did not follow Mendelian distributions where colours would be dictated strictly by copies of dominant or recessive genes, geneticist Sewal Wright suggested she (like other women) simply did not understand the underlying mathematics. During a visit, McClintock threw Joshua Lederberg and colleagues out of her lab for arrogance. He later declared, "By God, that woman is either crazy or a genius." According to McGrayne, a leading molecular biologist described her as "just an old bag who'd been hanging around Cold Spring Harbor for years." McClintock had no patience for arrogance. Barbara did not feel the need to keep defending her work. She said, "If you know you are on the right track, if you have this inner knowledge, then nobody can turn you off... no matter what they say." While McClintock thought her colleagues deemed her mad, she was respected. It might be more accurate to say her colleagues struggled to understand her work. Geneticist Alfred H. Sturtevant said in 1951, "I didn't understand one word she said, but if she says it is so, it must be so!"

She got a grant in 1957 from the National Academy of Sciences to research Central and South American indigenous maize strains so she could investigate the evolution of maize through chromosomal changes. In South America, she could work on a larger scale. In 1959 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Through extensive work in the 60s and 70s looking at chromosomal, morphological and evolutionary characteristics of maize strains she and her colleagues published The Chromosomal Constitution of Races of Maize, an influential publication for cytogenetics, paleobotany, ethnobotany and evolutionary biology. She had officially retired in 1967, becoming a Distinguished Service Member of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which allowed her to continue working with grad students as an emeritus scientist at Cold Spring Harbor. She also received the Kimber Genetics Awards.

In 1961, French geneticists François Jacob and Jacques Monod described genetic regulation of the lac operon and McClintock wrote an article for American Naturalist comparing this to her work on controlling elements in maize. She had effectively discovered genetic regulation though biology was slow to recognize this. When her colleagues finally saw transposons in bacteria, yeast and bacteriophages in the late 60s and early 70s, they had the tools to investigate the molecular basis for transposition, and her discoveries began to receive the credit they deserved. Today, mutant plants are generated using the Ac/Ds mechanism, to characterize gene function. We now know that transposons make up the majority, in fact, 85% of the maize genome and a significant portion of our own. McClintock did not get everything right but she had made a huge leap forward, years before anyone else. 

When the Carnegie Institute of Genetics closed in the early 70s, her corn field was removed to become a library parking lot. McClintock continued working and collaborating with colleagues Ben and Frances Burr at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where she  replanted her seeds and with Nina Federoff at the Carnegie Institute of Embryology in Baltimore. 

In 1970 she received the National Medal of Science. She was the first woman to do so. In 1973 Cold Spring Harbor named a building in her honour. The awards kept coming: the Louis and Bert Freedman Foundation Award (1978), the Lewis S. Rosensteil Award (1978), she received the first MacArthur Foundation Grant, the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, the Wolf Prize in Medicine, the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal from the Genetics Society of America, the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University, and in 1983 the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering "mobile genetic elements," 30 years after her discovery. She was the first woman to win the prize solo. When alerted of her win by a 6:00 phone call from the New York Times the morning it was announced, post-doc Grey Freyer found her collecting walnuts and congratulated her. "For what?" she asked. "You won the Nobel Prize!" he told her. "That's nice," she said. The administrative director got her to issue a press release, in which she wrote that it seemed unfair "to reward a person for having so much pleasure, over the years, asking the maize plant to solve specific problems and then watching its responses." When the reporters showed up, they found her again out collecting walnuts in dungarees and shirt. Colleague escorted her to the press conference but she was wearing a Groucho mask as a disguise. She told reporters "I've had a very, very, satisfying and interesting life."

Barbara McClintock in the Groucho mask

That year physicist, feminist and historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller published 'A Feeling for the Organism', a biography which brought McClintock's story to the public. In 1986 she was inducted in the National Women's Hall of Fame. In 1987, The Discovery and Characterization of Transposable Elements: The Collected Papers of Barbara McClintock was published. In 1989 she was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. In 1993 she received the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences of the American Philosophical Society. She received 14 honorary doctorates and an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters. She remained active in the Cold Spring Harbor community, giving talks on mobile genetic elements and the history of genetics for junior scientists for the rest of her life, playing tennis, collecting black walnuts for baking for colleagues. She would place the walnuts in her driveway and roll her Honda Accord over them, to crack them open to make brownies! Known for her lengthy and thorough answers to student questions, she had brownies at the ready when they looked tuckered out. Jim Watson hosted a large party with many of her colleagues for her 90th birthday. She died of natural cause at 90 years of age in 1992. Her colleagues remembered her brilliance, intensity, scientific focus, devoted mentorship, quick wit and sense of fun. Steven Jay Gould wrote, "Her discovery of transposable elements in maize - so-called jumping genes - first presented in the early 1950s before her field had any language to express such a heterodox idea, was, in retrospect, the beginning of modern molecular genetics." Posthumously, in 2005 the USPS issued a Barbara McClintock stamp, the McClintock Prize was named in her honour in 2013, and in 2024 the plant Stellaria mcclintockiae was named in her honour.

References

Chomet, P., and R. Martienssen. Barbara McClintock's Final Years as Nobelist and Mentor: A Memoir. Cell, 170, pp. 1049-1054. September 7, 2017.

Barbara McClintock. NobelPrize.org, Nobel Prize Outreach 2026. January 25, 2026.

Barbara McClintock, Wikipedia, accessed June, 2026.

Barbara McClintock's World, Weed to Wonder, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, accessed June, 2026.

Kim, Taeah. The Life of Barbara McClintock and her Jumping Gene. AMI Webinar Online Salon, 2020.

Krueger, Brian. Barbara McClintock discovered a little thing called the transposable element in 1950. omicly.com, May 5, 2024. 

Madrigal, Alexis. What was Barbara McClintock's "mysticism"?  Oakland garden club. September 2, 2023.

McGrayne, Sharon Bertsch. Nobel Prize Women in Science. Birch Lane Press, New York. 1993.

Pearse, Yewande. Meet Barbara McClintock, who used corn to decipher 'jumping genes,' Massive Science, May 11, 2018.

Zernike, Kate. The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT and the Fight for Women in Science. Scribner, New York, 2023.

Bluegrass and Cyanotypes

 

Bluegrass Cyanotype, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2026

I was walking by the local high school with my son and noticed the long grass and became curious about it. I like to use the iNaturalist app to identify species I don't know and so I learned this was smooth meadow grass, also known as Kentucky bluegrass. When I realized that, I knew instantly I had to made a cyanotype, combining the grass and the music. As well as the grass itself, I've imaged an excerpt of the sheet music for Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Stomp.

I took the opportunity to make some other botanical cyanotypes with plants from my garden or cut flowers.

Fern cyanotype, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2026

Wild Geranium Cyanotype, by Ele Willoughby, 2026

Virginia creeper cyanotype, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2026

Gerbera Daisies Cyanotype, 8.5" x 11" by Ele Willoughby, 2026

Lilies of the valley cyanotype, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby

Our Fate is Tied To That of the Insects

Our Fate is Tied To That of The Insects, 16" x 20" linocut print by Ele Willoughby

 

I made this print for Manufactured Ecosystems, and people keep asking me if I could sell them one, so I finally got around to making a small series of them and putting them in my shop. These are quite labour-intensive and involve using 17 different blocks, so I made a slightly variable series rather than a strict edition, but you have a chance to get one now. 

I'm thinking of also having some archival reproductions made which I can offer at a more affordable price point, if people would like them. That way I can maybe reach more people with my pro-pollinator propaganda!