매클린톡의 노벨상 강연의 5항목 분석

Abstract

This paper analyzes Barbara McClintock's 1983 Nobel Prize Lecture in Physiology and Medicine using the pentad method. Based on Kenneth Burke's dramatism, the pentad method can be used to analyze artifacts by means of five items: act, agent, scene, agency, and purpose in order to determine their motivation. McClintock's Nobel Prize Lecture does not focus on the introduction, derivation process, and contribution of her award-winning accomplishment, transposons or jumping genes, which leads to a question about why. Consequently, by weighing the five items one by one, this paper tries to understand the lecturer's motive for the talk. The act is to argue that the genome reponds actively to environmental stimuli, and the agent is McClintock, the lecturer who received recognition for her outstanding study with the assistance of his colleagues from early on, but is still a lonely female scientist who is rewarded with her research itself despite being shunned by academics. The scene is that among the arguments of the lecturer's genetic mobility and environmental activity, the genetic community accepts her argument for transposon and decides to award the Nobel Prize to McClintock, but still does not admit her key argument. The agency falls on the basis for her argument with the methods that the lecturer has used in her research, such as observations and experiments, setting hypotheses and verification, reasoning and generalization. The purpose is for the lecturer to persuade the audience of the groundbreaking idea that living organisms actively modify their genomes in response to external stimuli, resulting in species formation. This demonstrates that the pentad method is beneficial for studying the motivations of Mcclintock's Nobel Prize Lecture.