Humble people

Today, I've been remembering people that I admire and these are people that despite their greatness are or were humble.

One of the loveliest and humble I've met is Dr. N.T. Wright, former Bishop of Durham. Through persistent, excellent scholarship he has won the recognition he deserves as one of the greatest theologians of our times.

Mainly, though, I've been remembering Barbara McClintock, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1983. The only woman to be awarded the prize all on her own and a perfect example of a woman with guts, con agallas who could shrug off what the world thought of her.

The first time I saw Dr. McClintock, I was buying a snack in the basement of my building at Stony Brook. As I pulled the snack bag out of the machine, a tiny bag lady went by me and headed to the elevators. The basement was a normal route for entering the building and I just thought a mentally unstable bag lady had wandered in. I walked towards the elevator analyzing the simply dressed, elderly woman holding a number of bags in each hand. ("Should I get into the elevator with her?") I stood next to her waiting for the elevator and sipping a drink and, as I glanced at her one more time, I recognized her face. It was McClintock! My heroine! She worked at Cold Spring Harbor Labs (CSHL) and it was known she had a collaboration going with one of the professors. She was carrying those shopping bags because she was bringing specimens from her famous maize collection to show him.

McClintock, a woman scientist as there are or have been very few in the world! In her research, she was decades ahead of her colleagues and, in their incomprehension, they derided her as crazy and incompetent ("Jumping genes, indeed! Harrumph!") It was known locally that at CSHL, her colleague had made her life miserable and had even taken away her work space. Undaunted, she had refurbished an abandoned one-room building in the CSHL grounds and had done her solitary work there for decades, ostracized. And then, her colleagues had caught up with her brilliant mind: they had finally understood her work and she received long overdue recognition for it, including the Nobel Prize.

And yet, here she was still simply dressed, and despite being 81-82 years old, she was coming to her colleague instead of having him drive the 30-40 minutes to CSHL. What a woman!

For a year or two, I got used to seeing McClintock always with her shopping bags. I never said a word to her, just got to ride the elevator with her now and again. But the memory of the humble "bag lady" always warms my heart.

"Over the years I have found that it is difficult if not impossible to bring to consciousness of another person the nature of his tacit assumptions when, by some special experiences, I have been made aware of them. This became painfully evident to me in my attempts during the 1950s to convince geneticists that the action of genes had to be and was controlled. It is now equally painful to recognize the fixity of assumptions that many persons hold on the nature of controlling elements in maize and the manners of their operation. One must await the right time for conceptual change." - Barbara McClintock.