The aim of this paper is reframing Barbara McClintock’s research activities in the context of American maize genetics tradition. McClintock received the Nobel Prize for discovery of transposable elements in the maize chromosome. Interestingly, many historians of science who had an interest in McClintock have emphasized that the discovery isolated her within the genetics community, based on McClintock’s unique personality, especially her ardent interest in developmental biology. It is important that their term, “contemporary geneticists” refers to the major stream of geneticist, like drosophila geneticists, and that they implicitly accepted the single and linear history of American genetics from drosophila genetics to molecular genetics.
However, by giving the example of maize genetics, I will show that there had been, at least, another major area besides drosophila genetics in early 20th century genetics. At the beginning of the history of genetics, drosophila and maize genetics evolved through much communication and collaboration, but the difference in research material resulted in diverging research direction and methods, until eventually interaction between the two fields disappeared. McClintock tried to integrate both traditions against the current by upgrading the genetic principles of maize genetics to the general principles of life, transposable elements being her last trial. However, her efforts were not accepted by the American genetics community, and transposable elements, in that sense, can be read as a symbol of internal differentiation and confliction within American genetics community in the first half of the 20th century.