For instance, HIV is a type of transposon. (The word "transposon" dates from those years.) They were discovered to be of fundamental importance. But in the 70s transposons were rediscovered in bacteria and other organisms. Furthermore, McClintock was just a terrible, terrible writer. Even I, a card-carrying geneticist, find genetics papers among the most difficult to understand. That was partly because she was a woman, but it was also because her work was difficult for her contemporaries to understand. Although The Nobel Committee often takes a long time to recognize important work, this was a longer gap than usual. Barbara McClintock (1902 - 1992) won the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983 for work she began in the 1940s on what we now call transposons - mobile genetic elements, "jumping genes", in maize (what in the USA we usually call "corn").
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