Mendel's Laws of Inheritance — Founding of Genetics
Gregor Mendel published the rules of heredity in 1866 in a provincial natural history journal, and nobody noticed for thirty-four years. He was an Augustinian friar in Brno, in Moravia, who had failed the examination to become a certified teacher twice — the second time reportedly on a botany question — and who ran the monastery garden. Between 1856 and 1863 he grew some 28,000 pea plants and counted them. The choice of organism was the whole experiment. Peas self-pollinate, so lines breed true; they have clearly binary traits — tall or short, round or wrinkled, yellow or green; and they produce enough offspring for the ratios to be statistically meaningful. What he found was that traits do not blend. Crossing a tall and a short plant gives all tall offspring, and crossing those gives three tall to one short, which means the short factor was present and hidden in the first generation and reappeared intact. That result contradicted the assumption of the century, that inheritance was a mixing of fluids. He read the paper to the Brno society in 1865 and published in its proceedings, sent copies to prominent botanists, and got a discouraging response from Carl Nägeli, who told him to work on hawkweed, which reproduces in a way that makes his method useless. He became abbot in 1868 and did little further science. He died in 1884, and three separate botanists rediscovered his laws independently in 1900. His ratios are slightly too good, which statisticians have argued about since 1936.
- Year: 1866 CE
- Category: Scientific
