Science history: 'Father of modern genetics' describes his experiments with pea plants — and proves that heredity is transmitted in discrete units
On a cold day in February, an Augustinian friar described his experiments breeding garden-variety plants — and gave rise to the field of modern genetics.
Gregor Mendel was an Austrian priest who had spent eight years cultivating and crossbreeding more than 28,000 pea plants (Pisum sativum) in the garden of Monastery of St. Thomas in Brno (formerly known as Brünn), painstakingly recording details of the plants' progeny.
Mendel was actively discouraged from pursuing his research. His bishop giggled whenever Mendel told of his scientific experiments, according to a letter his abbot Cyril Napp wrote to him in 1859.
"He asked if I though [sic] it seemly for a man of your intellectual attainments to be plodding in a pea patch, prying into the germinal proclivities of peas. He suggested that pea propagation was a subject less worthy of your curiosity than, say, the writings of the Church Fathers or the Doctrine of Grace. My dear Brother Mendel, as sympathetic as I am to your researches [sic], we can ill afford to have the monastery made the laughingstock of the diocese."
But Mendel was undeterred from his research — not because of a deep-seated interest in plants, but because he wanted to reveal the principles of inheritance.
He had chosen to study the plants of this unassuming legume for a number of reasons. First, pea plants reproduced quickly and well in both pots and in the ground, according to an 1866 monograph he wrote about his research. Second, they seemed to have clear traits they passed along to their offspring — such as pink, white or red flowers — and the hybrids were perfectly fertile.
Finally, "accidental impregnation by foreign pollen, if it occurred during the experiments and were not recognized, would lead to entirely erroneous conclusions," he wrote.
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