 Since her death , McClintock has been the subject of a biography by the science historian Nathaniel C. Comfort 's The Tangled Field : Barbara McClintock 's Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control . Comfort 's biography contests some claims about McClintock , described as the " McClintock Myth " , which he claims was perpetuated by the earlier biography by Keller . Keller 's thesis was that McClintock was long ignored or met with derision because she was a woman working in the sciences . For example , when McClintock presented her findings that the genetics of maize did not conform to Mendelian distributions , geneticist Sewall Wright expressed the belief that she did not understand the underlying mathematics of her work , a belief he had expressed towards other women at the time . In addition , geneticist Lotte Auerbach recounted that Joshua Lederberg returned from a visit to McClintock 's lab with the remark : ' By God , that woman is either crazy or a genius . ' " As Auerbach tells it , McClintock had thrown Lederberg and his colleagues out after half an hour ' because of their arrogance . She was intolerant of arrogance ... She felt she had crossed a desert alone and no one had followed her . ' " 
