The Life of Gregor Mendel

Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, was born in 1822 to German parents Anton and Rosine Mendel on a small farm in Heisendorf, Austria. The first few years of his life were spent with his father operating the family farm. As a child, Gregor was fascinated with the relationship that plants and bees had with each other. He often spent his time gardening and looking at the differences amongst plants of the same species. When Gregor was 18, he went away to the University of Ullamook to study physics, philosophy, and religion. It was Gregor's profound love and interest in philosophy and religion was what led him to join the church and eventually step foot into the priesthood. While Mendel was attending Ullamook, he befriended the head of the Department of Agriculture, Johann Nessler. Nessler conducted experiments on the hereditary traits of plants and animals. It was at this time Gregor's interest in heredity began to take hold. In 1843, Gregor made the decision to join the priesthood. The same year, he entered the Augustinian Abbey of St. Thomas in Brno. Known as Johann all his life, he took Gregor to be his religious name, and in 1851, he was sent away to Vienna University to study physics under the profound professor Christian Doppler. After he had completed his studies at the University of Vienna, Gregor returned to his abbey to teach physics to seminary students. During his time at the abbey, Gregor, aside from breeding his famous pea plants, spent his free time keeping a colony of bees. He also found himself fascinated with astronomy and meteorology, and in 1865 founded the Austrian Meteorological Society. Inspired to pursue his studies in heredity by his good friend, professor, and colleague from Olomouc, Johann Nessler, Gregor Mendel began his studies on plant variation at the abbey. The nearly five acres of gardens that the abbey had were turned into his own personal testing plots for his pea plant experiments. It is said that in a span of seven years, from 1856 to 1863, Gregor had tested and planted over 29,000 pea plants. It is in these tests on his plants where we find Gregor's most notable achievements with alleles and allele frequencies. Through his experiments, Gregor bred his pea plants with the goal of separating ones with dominant, recessive, or hybrid alleles for various traits. By doing so, Gregor could achieve, with near 100% accuracy, a certain desired trait that he wanted to see. Over the course of several years and many thousands of experiments on pea plants, Mendel established two fundamental laws based on his findings, the law of segregation and the law of independent assortment. In his first law, the law of segregation, Mendel concluded four things. A gene can exist in more than one form. Organisms inherit two alleles for each trait. When gametes are produced, by meiosis, allele pairs separate, leaving each cell with a single allele for each trait. And when two alleles of a pair are different, one is dominant and the other is recessive. In his second law, the law of independent assortment, he states that allele pairs separate independently during the formation of gametes. This means that traits are transmitted to offspring independently of one another. Mendel formulated this principle after performing dihybrid crosses between plants that differed in two traits, such as seed color and pod color. Gregor published his findings in 1866 in a paper titled Experiments on Plant Hybridization. A few of his papers were printed in various newspapers across Europe, and later his laws became recognized as Mendel's Laws of Inheritance. However, all good things must come to an end, and for Gregor, his scientific work came to an end in 1868 with his promotion to abbot at his monastery. With his promotion, his focus in the science field was now diverted to administrative tasks and the daily duties of leading an abbey. In his final years, Gregor was at the forefront of a dispute between the government and their new taxes imposed on religious institutions all across Europe. Gregor, being a proud man, strong in his faith, opposed the government's attempts to tax abbeys until his death in 1884.