 Her work on controlling elements and gene regulation was conceptually difficult and was not immediately understood or accepted by her contemporaries ; she described the reception of her research as " puzzlement , even hostility " . Nevertheless , McClintock continued to develop her ideas on controlling elements . She published a paper in Genetics in 1953 , where she presented all her statistical data , and undertook lecture tours to universities throughout the 1950s to speak about her work . She continued to investigate the problem and identified a new element that she called Suppressor @-@ mutator ( Spm ) , which , although similar to Ac / Ds , acts in a more complex manner . Like Ac / Ds , some versions could transpose on their own and some could not ; unlike Ac / Ds , when present , it fully suppressed the expression of mutant genes when they normally would not be entirely suppressed . Based on the reactions of other scientists to her work , McClintock felt she risked alienating the scientific mainstream , and from 1953 stopped publishing accounts of her research on controlling elements . 
