Gregor Mendel

About this figure

Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) was an Augustinian friar and naturalist whose experiments breeding garden peas established the basic laws of inheritance, though his work went almost entirely unrecognized until well after his death. Born to a farming family in what is now the Czech Republic, he entered the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas in Brno (then Brünn), which supported his studies in science at the University of Vienna and gave him access to the monastery garden where he conducted his research, and where he was later elected abbot.

Between 1856 and 1863, Mendel bred tens of thousands of pea plants, carefully tracking traits such as seed shape, pod color, and plant height across generations, and found that these traits were inherited in predictable numerical ratios rather than blending together as most naturalists of the time assumed. From this he inferred that inherited traits were carried by discrete factors, passed from both parents, which could be dominant or recessive and which sorted independently into offspring -- principles now taught as the foundation of classical genetics, though the physical basis of his "factors" in what would later be called genes was unknown to him. He presented these findings to a local natural history society in 1865 and published them the following year, but the work drew little attention and was effectively forgotten for decades, in part because it addressed questions most contemporary biologists were not yet asking and used a quantitative, statistical approach unusual for the period.

Mendel's paper was rediscovered around 1900 by three botanists working independently -- Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich von Tschermak -- who each arrived at similar conclusions and credited Mendel's earlier priority once they found his original paper. The English biologist William Bateson subsequently became Mendel's most forceful champion, translating his original papers and defending his priority and significance against skeptics in works including Mendel's Principles of Heredity: A Defence. Administrative duties as abbot occupied much of Mendel's later life and left him little time to continue his experiments, and he died in 1884 without seeing the field of genetics his work would eventually found.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.