Gregor Mendel

Gregor Mendel (20 July 1822 – 6 January 1884) was a scientist, Augustinian friar and abbot of St. Thomas' Abbey in Brno, Margraviate of Moravia. Mendel was born in a German-speaking family in the Silesian part of the Austrian Empire (today's Czech Republic) and gained posthumous recognition as the founder of the modern science of genetics. Though farmers had known for millennia that crossbreeding of animals and plants could favor certain desirable traits, Mendel's pea plant experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 established many of the rules of heredity, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance.

Early life and education[edit | edit source]

Gregor Mendel was born into a German-speaking family in Hynčice (Heinzendorf bei Odrau in German), at the Moravian-Silesian border, Austrian Empire (now Hynčice, Czech Republic). He was the son of Anton and Rosine (Schwirtlich) Mendel, and had one older sister, Veronika, and one younger, Theresia. They lived and worked on a farm which had been owned by the Mendel family for at least 130 years.

Mendel's laws of inheritance[edit | edit source]

Mendel's laws of inheritance are statements about the way certain characteristics are transmitted from one generation to another in an organism. The laws were derived by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel based on experiments he conducted in the period from about 1857 to 1865. For his experiments, Mendel used ordinary pea plants.

Mendel's experiments[edit | edit source]

Mendel's experiments with pea plants were carried out over a seven-year period. He chose to use peas for his experiments due to their many distinct varieties, and because offspring could be quickly and easily produced. He cross-fertilized pea plants that had clearly opposite characteristics—tall with short, smooth with wrinkled, those containing green seeds with those containing yellow seeds, etc.—and, after analyzing his results, reached two of his most important conclusions: the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment, which later became known as Mendel's Laws of Inheritance.

Legacy[edit | edit source]

Mendel's work was not widely recognized until the turn of the 20th century. His ideas were rediscovered by other scientists who, like Mendel, were trying to determine how characteristics are passed from parents to offspring. Today, Mendel is recognized as the pioneer of genetics.

References[edit | edit source]

External links[edit | edit source]

Gregor Mendel at WikiMD

Gregor Mendel Resources
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