In our final instalment of Women Who Changed the World Wednesday, we'd like to introduce you Barbara McClintock.

”I know my corn plants intimately, and I find it a great pleasure to know them.”

Barbara is a scientist’s scientist: driven by curiosity, committed to exacting standards and deeply incisive. Though McClintock made many notable contributions to genetics, she is best remembered for her work on “jumping genes” or transposons. By 1902 it was known that chromosomes carried genetic information, but how they worked remained a mystery. In the late 1940s McClintock demonstrated that certain chromosomal segments could move around, resulting in kaleidoscopic colour patterns in maize.

It would take decades for the importance of this finding to be widely recognised but by the late seventies transposition was seemingly everywhere: it was the mechanism that could make bacteria resistant to antibiotics, make viruses infectious, or even cause cancer.

In 1983 McClintock received a Nobel Prize and the notion that her work had been long underappreciated came to the fore. Interviewers asked how she had managed to go on. She replied simply: “I never thought of stopping, and I just hated sleeping. I can’t imagine having a better life.”

Barbara's influential paper can be found at The origin and behavior of mutable loci in maize by Barbara McClintock-- taken from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 36 (6): 344-355. 

This short biopic of Barbara's incredible life was first published in Oh Comely Issue 29, alongside Cristina BanBan's beautiful illustrations. Inside, we also pluck pennies from pavements, watch caterpillars burst from cocoons, and talk personal turning points. Get your hands on a copy here!

Illustration: Cristina BanBan

Welcome to the third installment of our March mini-series on women who changed the world with their creativity. This week, we'd like you to meet one of our favourite artists, Claude Cahun. 

“My opinion on homosexuality and homosexuals is exactly the same as my opinion on heterosexuality and on heterosexuals: everything depends on the individuals and on the circumstances. I uphold people’s rights to behave as they wish.” 

Revealing whichever persona she felt like exploring, Claude Cahun’s self-portrait photographs challenged gender norms in early twentieth century Europe. In one image, she appears bald-headed, steely-eyed and suited. In another, she contorts limbs and tumbles from a cabinet full of homewares like a doll.

Relocating to the Channel Islands just before the second world war, Cahun instigated a resistance movement against the Nazi invasion, working alongside her lifelong partner Marcel Moore. As the pair repeatedly placed anti-fascist leaflets in coat pockets and on table tops, the occupying soldiers became convinced that a secret resistance group was operating on the island. Eventually they were sentenced to death for their characteristically subversive, artistic and defiant act.

Though the order was never carried out, their art was destroyed. Today they share a plot at St Brelade’s church in Jersey—entwined beneath the ground upon which they raised hell.

More information about Claude's extraordinary life can be found in Claude Cahun: Disavowals by Claude Cahun. Our extended selection of female muses to learn about and love features in Issue 29, alongside Cristina BanBan's beautiful illustrations. Inside, we also pluck pennies from pavements, watch caterpillars burst from cocoons, and talk personal turning points. Get your hands on a copy here!

Illustration: Cristina BanBan

Every Wednesday throughout March, we'll be introducing you to women who changed the world with their creativity. Our second instalment of the mini-series shines a spotlight on Jennie Lee. 

“As soon as I had an independent roof over my head, I was ready for battle.”

When the 24-year-old Jennie Lee became a member of parliament in 1929 she wasn’t even old enough to vote for herself. After growing up in a mining community so close-knit that her house literally had no back door, she went on to have one of the most colourful and inspiring political lives of the twentieth century.

A fearless, uncompromising socialist, her accomplishments included becoming the first minister for the arts and founding Britain’s last great social project, the Open University. Her 1965 governmental arts white paper—still the only arts paper ever written—argued for the arts to be a crucial part of everyday life, available to everyone. Under her stewardship the creation of new galleries, museums, music venues, theatres and other institutions fostered an unprecedented creative environment that continues to benefit the entire country.

Until the end of her life, Jennie was unable to attend the theatre without receiving a round of applause.

You can read more about her in Jennie Lee: A Life by Patricia Hollis, and find more of Cristina BanBan's beautiful illustrations of women who changed the world in Issue 29. Inside, we also pluck pennies from pavements, watch caterpillars burst from cocoons, and talk personal turning points. Get your hands on a copy here!

Illustration: Cristina BanBan

The twenty-ninth edition of Oh Comely celebrates change in all forms. Every Wednesday for the next four weeks, we'll be showcasing women who changed the world with their creativity, starting with Audre Lorde.

“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”

Audre identified as a “black feminist lesbian mother poet” not only because she happened to be all of those things, but because girls born to Caribbean migrants in 1930s Harlem weren’t encouraged to carve out identities all their own.

Entering the world partially blind and with initial learning difficulties, Audre penned her own unapologetic stanzas from around the age of twelve and went on to publish sixteen revelatory works on the nature of identity, whether enforced or chosen. Living her truth in a society fearful of difference, she established herself as a champion of the civil rights and women’s movements, laying bare the interlocking nature of oppression. Towards the end of her fourteen-year battle with cancer, she took the name Gamba Adisa in an African naming ceremony. It translates as, “warrior: she who makes her meaning known.”

You can find more of Cristina BanBan's beautiful illustrations of women who changed the world in Issue 29. Inside, we also pluck pennies from pavements, watch caterpillars burst from cocoons, and talk personal turning points. Get your hands on a copy here! More information about Audre's life and legacy can be found in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. 

Illustration: Cristina BanBan

Ian Baker fell in love with the mountains as a boy, learning to climb when he could barely walk. As a young student he visited Tibet and never left. Back in the West, he’s recently co-curated an exhibition at Wellcome Collection which showcases the tantric gems hidden within Tibet’s secret temples. Bringing together mural images and objects retrieved from what was once the Dalai Lama's private meditation chamber and beyond, it’s provides dazzling insight into ancient esoteric practices with surprising relevance to modern life. I called him to talk about treasure hunts and how it feels to lock oneself in a cave for weeks on end.

I read that even senior monks weren’t granted access to the Lukhang. How did you get in?

The reality is that during the great cultural revolution in China, which of course encompassed Tibet, all temples and monasteries were completely sealed for the better part of more than a decade. Any spiritual or religious life was partially suppressed, but in the early 1980’s the temples that had survived reopened. The Lukhang was among those, and had been largely forgotten when I visited in 1985. There was a little bridge that went across to it and it felt like stumbling across a treasure. It had these incredible murals on the top floor that somehow survived.

The murals have been restored and are the climax of the exhibition...

They’re absolutely extraordinary. They’ve been transformed quite literally from wall paintings into twenty-first century versions of stained glass windows. We see them as light boxes, but they look like stained glass. Stained glass has an importance within sacred spaces throughout Europe, but this is something almost futuristic. An incredible repository of teachings is represented in this completely illuminated and modern way. The 120 objects that precede it contextualise the practices presented in the murals themselves.  

There are some items on display which are quite dark in nature, like the sharp implements used to cut out the ego. I’d normally associate these with mortification - do they challenge fundamental Buddhist principles?

It’s a good question. You’ll see aprons made of human bones and upturned skull cups filled with wine at the exhibition, but these have nothing to do with mortification. With tantric buddhism, you go into the darkness and torture of the mind to bring about a fuller response to human life. For example, In early Buddhism, people meditated on top of corpses to recognise impermanence, and when the time of death came at high altitudes, bodies were cut up and fed to vultures on the top of hills. It was considered important that children come to these events at one point in their childhood, to confront mortality.

The exhibition explores the concept of hidden lands. How would you describe them to readers who may be unfamiliar with the concept?

We’ve inherited this concept of Shangri-La, a completely fictional creation from James Hilton, who in 1933 created this vision of an earthly paradise hidden in some remote part of the Himalayas. He was drawing on an ancient tradition that has existed in Tibet since the 8th century. The theory is that when you were somehow fortunate enough to find your way into such a place, ageing was somehow suspended. There were magical plants, sustenance, an idyllic climate.... All human civilisations look at the world and aim to find a place in which our vision of paradise can be manifested.

While you were on your search for the hidden lands, you meditated in caves for weeks on end. What was that like?

It was a challenge given to me by a senior Tibetan lama. He asked me, point-blank: ‘Can you spend a month alone?’. I went, and continued every summer after that.

I learnt that our happiness, our contentedness; all of those things we spent our lives trying to secure, are really not based on external circumstances. There’s a sense that erupts within that experience of very intentional solitude that isn’t there until you’ve come across it. Hidden lands are self-secrets, in a sense; they’re never truly hidden from the world, just from view.

Tibet’s Secret Temple, Curated by Ian Baker and Ruth Garde and featuring mural images by Thomas Laird, is running at Wellcome Collection until 28 February 2016. Visit wellcomecollection.org/secrettemple for more information. Images: The Wellcome Collection, Ian Baker

On 19^th November, a debate took place between Classics Professor Mary Beard, and the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. The title of the debate was rather ambiguous: 'Greece vs Rome'.

The debate not only sold out – forcing its host, Intelligence Squared, to locate to the biggest venue in central London, Westminster’s Central Hall – but its high demand was recognised by Curzon Home Cinema, who filmed the event and are now enabling those who missed out to watch it from their homes. But why the abundance of public interest? Was it the opportunity to see a politician debate outside of the political arena? Is there an untapped, widespread fascination with Classics? Or do people simply want a closer look at Boris Johnson’s luminous hair?

To try to understand both what the question of 'Greece vs Rome' was really asking, and why there was such public interest in the debate, I spoke with the delightful Mary Beard the day before the event. Perhaps Britain's best known classicist, Mary has developed a public profile not only as a pre-eminent scholar but as Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and for voicing her – at times controversial – political viewpoints.

To what extent is the underlying question of the debate, “which civilisation can we most relate to?”

You can always find wonderful things in the past and horrible things in the past, so I think the issue is not, as you say, what is “good” and “bad”, but what matters to us. In some way all civilisations have contributed to our deep history, but my claim is that there is more in Rome that makes up what we are than in ancient Greece.

In what way?

There’s a wonderful phrase by the Roman writer Tacitus, when he’s trying to imagine what the objections to Roman power are, and he says: “they make a desert and they call it peace.” I think there isn’t one of us, really, who can look over the last twenty years of Western interventions and not think “they make a desert and call it peace.”

How much can we say that the success of a civilisation is based upon the ability to conquer, rather than success as measured by the quality of the ideas it produces?

That’s always a big issue. Roman civilisation has got elements in it that have totally formed Western culture; Virgil’s great epic poem The Aeneid has been read by somebody every day since 19BC. You’ve also got the sense – in both the ancient and modern worlds – that alongside the soft power of culture is the brute force of boots on the ground. It’s not just whythey were successful, but what they thought of their success. What a lot of people don’t realise is that Romans were wondering about the way that conquest actually undermined the moral fibre of their race.

How important will the topic of politics be to the debate? And, seeing as you’re debating Boris Johnson, how much do you expect his own political background will shape his arguments?

I think politics is half the debate, but not all of it. You have to say: here we have two cultures which offer two versions. If we talk about ancient Athens, the slogan for at least 150 years was democracy; it was about people power. And that’s one of the slogans we’ve inherited. Whereas Romans would never claim to be democrats, but they talked about liberty: what “libertas” was and how you achieve the liberty of individual citizens. Those are two sides to our own sense of what our political system is. The Roman version is more topical because modern debates are about terrorism, stand-offs between the right of the individual citizen and homeland security. Rome looks at those issues head on and raised questions like: “is it right to execute a citizen in the interests of the state?”

So Rome is important because the people who will be sat in your audience tomorrow will want to engage with problems similar to those addressed by the Romans?

Now! Yes, now! The problems we face now! There is a lot of “now” about both the Greeks and Romans. But the Romans, they’re a big culture, they lived in a city of a million people, they had an empire of 50 or 60 million people – it's multivalent, it's polyglot, and it’s us in some way.

In a piece for the BBC last February you wrote about the lacklustre rhetoric used by many politicians. Do you think Boris Johnson will throw off his political rhetoric tomorrow and come out guns blazing?

[Laughs] I doubt it, but I hope so. He’s very funny, very witty. I don’t think Boris ever really throws off his political rhetoric.

Do you think he's the reason for the debate’s popularity?

It’s got to be Boris – it’s not me! If you got Boris talking about nuclear fusion, would you get an audience? I think you would. It goes along with people wanting to think about the past, that the ancient world gives us new and different ways of talking about the problems we want to face.

In that same BBC piece you referenced Nick Clegg’s phrase “alarm clock Britain”, and wrote: ‘most of us don’t wake up to an alarm clock anymore, just some preselected music’. On the morning of the debate, what song will be waking you up?

I think it’s got to be "Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves".

Intelligence Squared's Greece vs Rome event featuring Mary Beard is available to watch now on Curzon Home Cinema: http://www.curzonhomecinema.com/#!/film/CRZ_GREECE_VS_ROME

For our upcoming Secrets issue, we’re calling upon readers to submit extracts from their joyously embarrassing teen diaries by Monday 26th October. Spilling your heart out to a national publication is a brave feat, but Emma Wright of Oh Dear Diary takes things to a higher level through her dizzyingly cringeworthy comedy nights.

Would you read out an excerpt from your teenage diary to a room full of people eagerly awaiting a good laugh? Emma organises live diary-reading events in Manchester and Birmingham, with the help of If Destroyed Still True blogger, Tess Simpson. Locals come together to relive their teenage years and to listen to volunteers recite entries from their own past diaries. The result is stand-up with a nostalgic twist. Audiences can expect large doses of teen angst and strops aplenty.

We caught up with Emma to find out more.

Why teenage diaries, Emma? Why unearth the most embarrassing years of our lives?

I think you've answered your own question there! Childhood diaries are generally funny and cute. Adult diaries are more serious. But teenage diaries ... they're written at a time when you're really torn between two worlds. The bizarre juxtapositions this creates are what makes Oh Dear Diary so funny, like when one of our readers said she loved a boy 'more than school holidays!’.

Do you ever read out excerpts from your own teenage diary at events?

I do. I'm trying to wean myself off it but, as the organiser, it sort of feels rude not to. Often the other readers are nervous, so seeing me go up there and be the first to bare my soul is helpful.

How do you select readers? Do you read through their diaries prior to inviting them to speak?

It's an open invitation, but it's not an open mic. People have to register before the show. 

I make sure to talk to the readers as much as possible beforehand, and I do ask people to send me scans of their diary, or at least an idea of what they'll be reading about. I think it's important to make sure the readings are genuine, that they're actually from people's teenage years, and that they're going to be funny. 

That last bit sounds harsh - humour is terribly subjective, after all - but we are essentially a comedy event, so I have to be careful. Of course introspection is natural in a teenage diary, and we have had readers cover some very serious subjects, but I want to make sure there's a balance and that people will come away happy, not perturbed!

Can you remember any particularly funny stories that have surfaced at your events? 

The humour comes from the mundane details and innocuous comments, and often it's not so much the anecdotes themselves that are funny but the way they're expressed. As teens we treated everything with equal importance... or lack of it. For example, one of our volunteers read an extract about a History lesson at the second Birmingham show. It read, "learned about the holocaust in history today. Not nice. Well, that’s all. Bye!”.

Another reader, Sarah, wrote: ‘The prowler came back last night, so it can’t be Linda because she was in Blackpool…’. I don’t know what makes that so funny - I love the lack of context!

Did you ever read anyone's diary that you shouldn't have when you were younger? (Or, did anyone sneak a peek at yours?)

No! Actually, I'm not sure I knew anyone else who kept diaries at the time. I didn't go looking.

My mum only read mine once (that I know of). On holiday I'd been using a notepad in lieu of my regular diary to moan about how miserable and bored I was, and she found it. From what I remember, she ignored the fact I was going through an existential crisis and just told me off for swearing!

All images: Emma Wright of Oh Dear Diary. Oh Dear Diary / If Destroyed Still True

In the final installment in our series Women on Wheels, Liz Seabrook spoke to Kat Jungnickel about riding - and racing - a penny farthing. 

This interview was first published in Issue 26. You can buy the issue here or subscribe to Oh Comely here. 

It’s quite something cycling through London behind a penny-farthing. People stare, smile, laugh, point and shout, and fellow cyclists ding their bells in unison. It’s quite the event. Perched on top of this penny-farthing is Kat Jungnickel. I met Kat three springs ago. I’d just moved to London and I had a commission from Bristol-based bike magazine, Boneshaker. Since taking her portrait one early summer morning on Brick Lane, I’ve bumped into Kat (and Penny) decked out in handmade period garb for the Tweed Run, racing in the Nocturne races at Smithfield and at various other cycling hotspots across the city. Naturally I wondered: how do you become a penny-farthing racer? For Kat, it all began at the age of nine with a step-through lemon Apollo, which was slightly too big and had a basket on the front.

“It was a classic first bike. I grew into it and grew out of it. I used to attempt BMX jumps on it, down in the local reserve,” she smiles mischievously as we chat in the sun in London’s Victoria Park. “I’d help the boys build the jumps, but I didn’t have a BMX. They wouldn’t let me ride theirs, so I would just try anyway. I didn’t break anything, but often ended up tangled in the sides of the jump. It was always great fun.”

Kat grew up in Newcastle, Australia, an industrial town some four hours north of Sydney. When I ask her whether there was a cycle culture when she was growing up, she looks perplexed, as if she’s never considered it before. This is interesting, as Kat has studied many cycle cultures in the UK for postdoctoral research. “Australia has a very car-dominated culture. It’s a rite of passage; when you were of age you swapped your bike for car. Cycling was how we got to school, how we played and how we’d get to the local pool.”

Seventeen years ago, Kat arrived in London to “have a look.” In my mind, to be the prolific cyclist that Kat is today, bikes must have always been part of her day-to-day existence. But this is not the case: “Arriving in London, I found the public transport system extraordinary. It actually worked so much better than it did in Australia. I remember one of my flatmates’ friends gave her a bike and it just sat in our hallway. No one touched it. Looking back it’s so funny that I didn’t recognise its potential for my life.”

After a few years in the city, Kat returned to university. Campus was swarming with bicycles and cycling drifted back into Kat’s consciousness. Serendipitously, this awakening coincided with a friend leaving the London to return to his native Chicago to complete a post-doc. “He was giving away books, beans, rice, and his bike. It wasn’t anything extraordinary—a Specialized Hardrock steel bike—but he clearly had a special connection to it. This was his lemon Apollo. We agreed that I’d look after it for him on a sort of extended loan, along with his stinky helmet, old lock and some lights. I had everything I needed.”

They say you never forget how to ride a bike and to some extent that’s true, but you do forget how to balance. You forget how to ride with confidence and you forget how traffic moves. And at this point, Kat hadn’t ridden a bike in quite some time. “I cycled from his house in Clapton back into town, and it was terrifying! I couldn’t take a hand off the handlebars to indicate and I did a few Flintstones stops, but I was absolutely exhilarated. I couldn’t believe the high that I had from that cycle home. I felt I was flying like the wind—I remember going past buses and thinking I was superhuman. I just couldn’t get the smile off my face.”

For five years Kat and this slightly-too-big bike were firm friends, commuting, touring the Outer Hebrides and riding all the way from Hackney to Bilbao. Then, it was polished up and shipped back to the US with a courier that cost far more than the bike’s monetary value.

A few years later, Kat found herself back in Australia working on a PhD researching DIY technologies. One day, she found a flyer attached to her bike inviting her to a ‘tall bike jousting’ event. “I turned up at the Arena of Scrapey, a car park with very uneven asphalt, and it was madness. People had hand-built rubbish bicycles: very tall ones, very long ones, crazy choppers and a few penny-farthings. There was huge music, lots of drinking and I felt like I had found my people. A person with a penny let me ride it. I had my foot on the step and hand on the handlebars, and I remember thinking it was interesting but mainly just a massively ridiculous bicycle. Then I got on it, and realised I needed one.”

When I ask why, she simply asks if I’ve ever ridden one. I shake my head, secretly hoping she’ll offer me a go. “It’s a completely different feeling. There’s something incredibly beautiful about riding it. You find yourself engaging differently with the landscape in which you’re riding. You have to think about speed bumps, potholes, low-hanging trees and how to get off. Every bike is a different experience, but the penny just shifts everything again.”

One day in 2007, Kat picked her penny up from an airport in Adelaide. “Some friends put it together in the car park, which is where I took my first significant tumble, trying to get off to the side like a normal bike. My feet got caught in the spokes and I fell head first into a hedge.” A year later, Kat was back in Tasmania at the Australian penny championships; in her first ever penny race she placed second.

Since acquiring Penny, Kat has continued to race, ridden through the Peak District and fallen into several more hedges. Only once has she achieved what is known as an ‘imperial crowner’, where front wheel stops dead and the rest of the bike pitches over the front. “I had a jumper around my waist and it went into the wheel. I ended up face-planting with my legs caught in the wheel, stuck vertically.”

When I ask what’s next, that glimmer of mischief returns to her face and I’m suddenly looking into the face of a curly-haired nine-year-old, tangled in the frame of a lemon Apollo. She points to a long scar down the length of her shin, “I did that jumping off the jetty into a lake last year on my friend’s BMX, so I decided to get some tuition.” At 42 years old, Kat has just begun BMX lessons.

Read more in this series: Lois Pendlebury Rides a Skateboard; Meg Peplowen Rides a Mobility Scooter; Pam Prescod Drives a Bus; Stefanie Mainey Competes on Roller Skates.