Johann Gregor Mendel was a biologist and priest who conducted experiments on heredity using pea plants. He discovered that traits can be dominant or recessive and are transmitted independently, creating a foundation for modern genetics. Despite his groundbreaking work, he was largely unrecognized during his lifetime and only gained recognition after his death. His discoveries have led to advanced research in hereditary diseases and the manipulation of traits in agriculture. Mendel died in 1884, but his work has had a long-lasting impact on the scientific community.
Johann Gregor Mendel was a biologist and ordained priest who conducted experiments on heredity. He used his resources in his monastery to cultivate thousands of pea plants, maintaining detailed records and calculations that disproved the previous “combination of traits” theory. Although people largely did not recognize his work during his lifetime, extensive research on him has shown that the characteristics can be dominant or recessive and are transmitted independently. These facts have transformed the face of genetics.
Life and training
Mendel was born to Rosine and Anton Mendel on July 22, 1822 in Heinzendorf, Austria, now Hynčice, Czech Republic. At the young age of 11 he moved with his family to Troppau to be able to continue his education and graduated in 1840. From there attended the Philosophical Institute of Olmütz University, excelling in mathematics and physics and graduating in 1843 .
After graduating from Olmütz, he entered the St. Thomas Monastery in Brno, where he had access to a large amount of research materials. Although he was ordained a priest in 1847, partly due to ill health, he temporarily gave up his civil work in the area and enrolled at the University of Vienna. His study of him there prepared him to return to St. Thomas Monastery and to accept a teaching job in a secondary school. In this context, he was able to start the first of his experiments related to genetics.
Experiments with pea plants
Even though scientists had studied heredity before Mendel, many questions were still unanswered. Interested in this field and partly for fun, he decided to experiment with pea plants because they could be grown quickly and because there were so many different types available. Between 1856 and 1963 he created thousands of new hybrid plants with different characteristics using cross-pollination techniques. With each new generation of plants, he observed traits such as seed, cotyledon, flower and pod color, pod shape, flower and pod location, and plant height.
Although he did not identify genes as they are now known, per se, Mendel used mathematical relationships and detailed records to show that offspring inherit two genes from their parents, one from the mother and one from the father. These can be “dominant” or “recessive”, depending on whether the traits to which they refer are expressed. A recessive trait does not manifest in the offspring unless both parents pass on recessive genes, while a dominant trait can manifest even when only one parent contributes a dominant gene. Mendel summarized these results and called them the Law of Segregation. He also invented another concept, the law of independent assortment, which states that pairs of alleles separate independently during gamete formation and that traits, therefore, are transmitted separately from each other.
Confident in his conclusions, in 1865, Mendel wrote about his work under the title Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybride (Experiments on Plant Hybrids) and read the article twice to the Brno Natural History Society. He formally published his research in 1866. Despite this, many scientists of the time generally misunderstood his experiments and conclusions or thought the work simply confirmed what people already knew. Mendel also didn’t promote his findings much beyond his initial talks and publication, so during his lifetime, people all but ignored what he accomplished.
It wasn’t until the early 20th century that people started focusing on what he had discovered. Three European biologists, Erich Tschermak, Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns, found experiments on plant hybrids while conducting agricultural research. The trio confirmed their conclusions and, after a priority dispute, admitted they deserved credit. With this independent verification, his work has finally been brought to the fore.
Meaning of his work
Mendel’s experiments eliminated the previous misconception that an organism’s traits are a mixture or mixture of the mother or father. They demonstrated that the characteristics inherited by living things do not change from one generation to another, but simply vary in whether they are visible. This discovery created a solid foundation for the field of modern genetics and demonstrated that statistics are important in biology.
While he did not fully realize that his conclusions were broadly applicable to most species, the scientists who came after him did. They used his studies to begin advanced research into not just general characteristics like hair color, but to solve puzzles related to hereditary diseases. Thanks to him, biology and medicine professionals can manipulate which traits appear, an increasingly common practice in agriculture, or even analyze the statistical risk of developing certain conditions.
Later life
Partly due to poor eyesight, Mendel eventually gave up his scientific pursuits to focus on the administrative responsibilities of the abbey over which he presided. Conflicts related to monastery taxation kept him largely isolated within his own monastery and separated from the public, making it more difficult to be part of the scientific community. He died in Brno on January 6, 1884 at the age of 62 of chronic nephritis, not knowing the long-term and long-lasting effects that his experiments would have on the scientific community and in general. Before his death, however, he said he believed it would not be long before “the whole world (would) laud the result of (his) labours,” a prediction that took only 16 years after his death to come true. . He is buried in the central cemetery in Brno.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
