'My plan to study snapdragon transposons was met with scepticism. What new insights could I possibly hope to arrive at in a system that was so poorly developed compared with maize? I left inspired by her ageless mind but discouraged by her advice to forget snapdragons. Seven years later I was invited to give a talk in Cold Spring Harbor on the ABC model of flower development. Barbara (McClintock) was in the audience. After the talk, I mentioned to her that we’d met a while ago but assumed she wouldn’t remember. “Sure, I remember,” she said, “I gave you some bum advice”.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)01272-1