Gregor Mendel

As a young man he had very close and loving relations with his parents. Being a monk, he never married and led a life of celibacy.

He died at the age of 61 after suffering from kidney problems.

His work on heredity which did not find much acceptance during his lifetime took on much greater significance after his death and he was posthumously hailed as the father of modern genetics.

Gregor Mendel was born as the middle child and only son of Anton and Rosine Mendel. He had two sisters and the family lived and worked on the farm they had owned for generations.

As a child he worked in the garden and studied beekeeping which cultivated in him a deep love for biological sciences.

He received his early schooling in his own small village but had to be sent to a nearby town for his secondary education. The decision to send away their only son was not an easy one for his parents, but they did it for sake of his future.

Later on he went to the University of Olomouc where he studied philosophy and physics from 1840 to 1843.

In 1843, he began his training as a priest and joined the Augustinian Abbey of St Thomas in Brno as a monk. He took the name ‘Gregor’ on entering the religious field.

The monastery sent him to the University of Vienna to study under Abbot C.F.Napp. There he studied physics and mathematics under Christian Doppler and botany from Franz Unger.

He rejoined the monastery as a teacher in 1853 where he was motivated by his colleagues to conduct a study on plants.

He began to conduct his practical study on plants in 1856.He studied edible pea plants and recognized seven distinct characteristics that remained consistent over generations in purebred varieties. These characteristics included: height of the plant, shape of the pod, shape of the seed, size and colour of the seeds, etc.

He cross-pollinated the plants with contrasting characteristics in order to study the effects on the offspring. He also took due precaution to prevent accidental pollination by insects. He cultivated thousands of pea plants over the course of his experiments.

Mendel through his extensive experimentation and analysis founded the three laws or principles of inheritance: The law of segregation, the law of dominance, and the law of independent assortment.

He developed the concepts of dominant and recessive genes that explain how genetic traits are passed along from generation to generation.

His 1865 paper ‘Experiments on Plant Hybridization’ which was largely ignored during his lifetime is today regarded as the base of genetic experimentation.