 In 1947 , McClintock received the Achievement Award from the American Association of University Women . She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959 . In 1967 , McClintock was awarded the Kimber Genetics Award ; three years later , she was given the National Medal of Science by Richard Nixon in 1970 . She was the first woman to be awarded the National Medal of Science . Cold Spring Harbor named a building in her honor in 1973 . She received the Louis and Bert Freedman Foundation Award and the Lewis S. <unk> Award in 1978 . In 1981 , she became the first recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Grant , and was awarded the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research , the Wolf Prize in Medicine and the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal by the Genetics Society of America . In 1982 , she was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University for her research in the " evolution of genetic information and the control of its expression . " 
