IN THE FIELD

A female geneticist makes her way through the scientific world of the mid-20th century.

Even before her first brush with cytogenetics in college, Kate has always known she was different—alienated by her appearance-focused mother and sister; “stifled and out of place” in the small Brooklyn house where she’d grown up. Shaped by the memory of her father, a physician who’d died in World War II when she was a child, Kate has “always been interested in where things came from and how they worked…in what was going on under the rubbery skin of the visible world.” But it’s only when Kate takes an introductory biology course at Cornell that her lifelong preoccupation with genetics begins to blossom. As a research assistant in the school’s greenhouses, Kate is taught to study the inherited characteristics of hybrid plant crosses; while there, she meets mellow-natured John Thatcher, a fellow RA who becomes a collaborator and lifelong friend. As the two progress first through Cornell’s botany Ph.D. program and then the bureaucratic labyrinth of research academia, Kate must learn to carve her way through the male-dominated scientific world—pursuing her own experiments without external support; fending off romantic advances from colleagues; contending with theft of her discoveries. In a career that takes Kate from Cornell to the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor laboratory to, eventually, the Nobel Prize for her discovery of genetic transposition at the apex of her career—showing that DNA sequences can change their positions in a genome, creating or reversing genetic mutations—Kate learns that a life of the mind is not always compatible with romantic relationships or even comprehensible to the people around her, even those she loves most. This novel, whose protagonist is modeled after Barbara McClintock, the first and only woman to win the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine alone, offers a compelling journey through the frustrating, stymied, yet often fascinating world of scientific innovation. Kate is a satisfying character to root for—stubborn, tender, and occasionally myopic—though some supporting characters are underdeveloped or slot into predictable subplots. Still, Pastan’s ability to display the distinctly human side of scientific discovery—its many pitfalls, thrills, and missteps—keeps the novel’s heart alive.

Engaging and heartfelt.