In 1923, having persuaded her resistant mother to send her to college, Kate Croft falls in love with science. Painfully rebuffed by a girl she longs for, and in flight from her own confusing sexuality, Kate finds refuge in the calm rationality of biology: its vision of a deeply interconnected world, and the promise that the new field of genetics can explain the way people are. But science, too, turns out to be marred by human weakness. Despite her hard work and extraordinary gifts, Kate struggles, facing discrimination, competition, and scientific theft. At the same time, a love affair is threatened by Kate's obsession with figuring out the meaning of the puzzling changes she sees in her experiments. The novel explores what it takes to triumph in the ruthless world of mid-20th-century genetics, following Kate as she decides what she is-and is not-willing to sacrifice to succeed.
A Selected Title of the National Book Foundation and the Alfred B. Sloan Foundation's Science + Literature Program
Brilliant, terribly stubborn, and ill-suited to the expectations of the period, Kate Croft has shattered her widowed mother's traditional hopes for her in favor of higher education. Rejecting domestic pressures, she has cleaved out an alternative channel for herself, one that deprioritizes marriage and children. More subversive still are the complexities of her sexuality, her pursuit of queer relationships in an intensely heteronormative era. Most notably, though, she has taken a hammer to her field, making debris of its governing premises and challenging the very fundamentals of evolutionary theory.
Spanning nearly sixty years, we follow Kate from her first introductory biology course at Cornell to her receipt of the Prize, a journey ridden with obstacles. Kate's scientific medium, maize, is unglamorous and undervalued in academia. Her research is so visionary that it alienates her peers, who are unable to grasp its complex implications. Subject to both implicit and explicit sexism, Kate finds herself perpetually on the defensive, struggling to distinguish between those who care for her and those who wish to oppress her, a dynamic that traps even her longtime friendships in a state of precarity. She struggles to straddle the chasm between the physical field where her corn grows, her oasis, and the corresponding professional field, beleaguered by bias and petty politics.
