Gregor Mendel
Gregor Mendel discovered the laws of inheritance and was ignored for thirty-five years. Born Johann Mendel in 1822 in Heinzendorf in Austrian Silesia to a peasant family, he was academically outstanding but too poor to continue; his sister gave up part of her dowry to fund his studies, and he entered the Augustinian abbey of St Thomas in Brno in 1843 partly because it offered an education he could not otherwise afford. He failed the examination to become a certified teacher twice, apparently through anxiety, and was sent to the University of Vienna, where he studied physics under Christian Doppler and learned the combinatorial and statistical methods that made his work possible. This is the decisive difference between him and earlier hybridists: he counted. Between 1856 and 1863 he grew some 28,000 pea plants in the monastery garden, choosing seven characteristics that appear in two clean alternative forms — seed shape, flower colour, plant height and so on. He crossed true-breeding lines, found that one form disappeared entirely in the first generation and reappeared in about a quarter of the second, and concluded that inheritance is carried by discrete factors, one from each parent, which do not blend and which segregate independently. He presented the results to the Brno natural science society in 1865 and published in its proceedings in 1866. The paper was distributed to over a hundred institutions and essentially nobody understood its importance; it was cited a handful of times in three decades. He became abbot in 1868, and administration ended his research. He died in 1884. Three botanists rediscovered the laws independently in 1900.
- Lived: 1822 CE – 1884 CE
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: botanist, scientist, friar
