Correction to: Nature Reviews Genetics https://doi.org/10.1038/s41576-023-00652-3, published on 18 September 2023.

In the version of the article initially published, in the “Transitioning views of transposable elements” section, the sentence now reading “McClintock officially retired from the Carnegie Institution in 1967 but remained active in research and training at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as professor emerita” mistakenly said “scientist emeritus”. This has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.