Mendel

NAME: Mendel, Gregor Johann

ACHIEVEMENTS: Biological hereditiy

NICKNAME/ALIAS:

BIRTH: 22 July 1822; Hyncice, Moravia (Czechoslovakia)

DEATH: 6 January 1884; Brünn, Austria.

CATEGORY: Science

DISCIPLINE: Botany

LANGUAGE: German

PARENTS: Peasant farmers (names not noted)

SIBLINGS: none

SPOUSE: never married

CHILDREN: none

EDUCATION: local schools; Philosophic Institute at Olomouc (Olmutz), Czech Republic; Brünn Theological College, Czech Republic

MAJOR WORK: “Experiments in Plant Hybridization,”published in 1866.

LIFE AND TIMES: Gregor Mendel was ordained as an Augustinian priest at St. Thomas Monastery in Brünn on August 6, 1847, following his graduation from the Brünn Theological College. He was assigned pastoral duties at first, but it was soon clear that he was better suited to teaching. He was assigned to teach at a secondary school, but when he took the state qualifying examination, he failed.

Realizing that Mendel was self-taught, one of his examiners recommended that he go to the University of Vienna for additional study. Mendel’s Abbot agreed, and Mendel attended the University from 1851 to 1853, studying the natural sciences and mathematics. It was during this time that he acquired the research skills and methodologies that he would apply to his later work.

Mendel returned to Brunn in 1854. He again failed to pass the state qualifying exam, withdrawing when he became ill, probably due to acute test anxiety. He continued teaching part-time, and began his experiments with cross-breeding garden peas. As a child, he had worked as a gardener, and over the next eight years, he cultivated and tested thirty-four different kinds of peas, totaling over 28,000 pea plants, in the experimental garden at the monastery.

Prior to Mendel’s work, heredity was seen as both a blending and dilution of parental characteristics in the offspring. Mendel’s work demonstrated that the appearance of different parental characteristics in succeeding generations of offspring followed specific laws which could be determined mathematically.

His experiments resulted in two generalizations, later known as Mendel’s Laws of Heredity: the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment. He was the first to understand the importance of statistical investigation (hence his use of the 28,000 plants) and the first to apply mathematical principles to a biological investigation.

Mendel presented his findings in two lectures for the Society for the Study of the Natural Sciences in Brünn in 1865. His paper, “Experiments in Plant Hybridization” was published in the Society’s journal the following year, and was sent to 133 other associations of natural scientists and to a number of libraries.

Mendel ordered forty reprints of the article, which he sent out for review to other scholars, including <sent paper to> Naegeli* and <sent paper to> Charles Darwin*.

Naegli dismissed the genetic studies of Gregor Mendel as being of interest only as empirical observations, although he and Mendel conducted an extensive correspondence. Mendel’s theories did not agree with Darwin’s theories, which were influenced by his cousin, Francis Galton.

Where Mendel believed that progenitors contributed equally to their progeny, Darwin believed that each generation’s contributions were diluted in succeeding generations.

Consequently, Darwin also ignored Mendel’s work, and the paper was largely forgotten by the scientific community.

In March 1868, Mendel was elected Abbot of St. Thomas’ Monastery. His new duties kept him away from his research. He died on January 6, 1884.

ASSESSMENT: Mendel was the first to apply mathematical and scientific principles to the biological process of heredity, by tracking characteristics physically and statistically rather than by observing results and deducting the process by which the results were obtained. His work is the foundation for the genetic research that led to the mapping of the human genome, genetic manipulation of major agricultural crops such as corn and tomatoes, and to experiments in cloning sheep and other animals.

EXTRA CONNECTIONS: In 1900 three scientists independently and simultaneously re-discovered Mendel’s paper and confirmed his work: <work confirmed by> Correns*, <work confirmed by> De Vries* and <work confirmed by> Tschermak*.

Was taught by <taught by> Doppler*

In celebration of his 200th birthday, Mendel's body was exhumed and his DNA sequenced.

ONELINER: Gregor Mendel, early genetics pioneer

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Wikipedia