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Barbara McClintock – geneticist and genius – was shunned for years by her male colleagues, but got her own back with a Nobel prize in her eighties. She became the first heroine of a new feminist critique of male-dominated science. But in the retelling, her story has become myth, says Nathaniel Comfort (The Tangled Field, Harvard University Press, $17.95/£11.95). And he deconstructs that myth without diminishing her genius, her science or the instincts that created the myth.