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McClintock, Barbara

(Encyclopedia)McClintock, Barbara, 1902–92, American geneticist. She discovered that certain genetic material, “transposable elements” or “jumping genes” (now called transposons), shifted its location in ...

Mitchell, Margaret

(Encyclopedia)Mitchell, Margaret, 1900–1949, American novelist, b. Atlanta, Ga. Her one novel, Gone with the Wind (1936; Pulitzer Prize), a romantic, panoramic portrait of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods...

Mitchell, Peter Dennis

(Encyclopedia)Mitchell, Peter Dennis, 1920–92, British chemist, Ph.D. Cambridge, 1950. A professor at the Univ. of Edinburgh (1955–63), Mitchell was named director of Glynn Research Laboratories in 1964. He for...

Le Duc Tho

(Encyclopedia)Le Duc Tho fän dĭn kī [key], 1911–90, Vietnamese political leader. A Vietnamese nationalist and one of the founders (1930) of the Indochinese Communist party, he opposed the French colonial regim...

Patchett, Ann

(Encyclopedia)Patchett, Ann, 1963–, American author, b. Los Angeles, B.A. Sarah Lawrence College, 1984, M.F.A Univ. of Iowa, 1987. In her twenties she was a writer at Seventeen magazine, wrote freelance essays fo...

Borlaug, Norman Ernest

(Encyclopedia)Borlaug, Norman Ernest bôrˈlôg [key], 1914–2009, U.S. agronomist, b. near Saude, Iowa, grad. Univ. of Minn. (Ph.D., 1942). He worked as researcher with the E. I. du Pont Company until 1944, when ...

Barish, Barry Clark

(Encyclopedia)Barish, Barry Clark, 1936–, American experimental physicist, b. Omaha, Nebr. Ph.D. Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1962. Barish has been a professor (emeritus from 2005) at the California Institute o...

privateering

(Encyclopedia)privateering, former usage of war permitting privately owned and operated war vessels (privateers) under commission of a belligerent government to capture enemy shipping. Private ownership distinguish...

Kelly, George

(Encyclopedia)Kelly, George, 1887–1974, American playwright, b. Philadelphia. He began his career as a vaudevillian, as both an actor and skit writer. His best-known plays, penetrating satires on American middle-...

Aston, Francis William

(Encyclopedia)Aston, Francis William, 1877–1945, English physicist and chemist. He was affiliated with the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, from 1910. In 1922 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry mainly for h...