Barbara McClintock was a pioneering American geneticist whose discovery of transposable or "jumping genes" in the 1940s baffled most of her contemporaries for nearly three decades. A recluse by nature, McClintock spent nearly fifty years working apart from the mainstream of the scientific community. Yet her colleagues had such a high regard for her as an adherent to rigid scientific principles that they accepted her discovery of transposable genes decades before others could confirm her observations. McClintock was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology in 1983 for this prescient discovery.

McClintock's childhood years shaped her to be a woman who lived outside of the conventional expectations of both the scientific and secular worlds. The third of four...