Gregor Mendel reads his first paper on genetics to the local scientific organization.
From 1856 to 1863, Mendel grew 28,000 pea plants in his monastery’s garden. He kept careful records of his crossbreeding experiments, recording each individual plant’s height, pod shape, flower location and color, and seed shape and color. He presented his literally seminal research at the Nature Research Society of Brünn (now Brno, Czech Republic) on February 8 and March 8, 1865. The papers introduced the concepts of dominant and recessive factors. He also postulated his two laws of heredity:
The Law of Segregation: An organism inherits two factors from its parents but contributes only one to its offspring.
The Law of Independent Assortment: Different traits are sorted separately from one another.
Taken together, these new concepts explained why crossbreeding pea plants that have purple flowers (dominant factor) with plants that have white flowers (recessive factor) yields three-quarters purple-flowered plants and one-quarter white-flowered in the next generation.
Mendel published his lectures as “Experiments on Plant Hybridization” in 1866. The methodical monk sent reprints to forty leading biologists. Only one responded. Charles Darwin (see here) never read his copy, this even though both Darwin and natural-selection codiscoverer Alfred Russel Wallace (see here) had acknowledged they could not explain how traits of successful organisms in one generation were passed on to the progeny.
Mendel’s paper was cited a mere three times over the next thirty-five years. He died in 1884. It was 1900 before biologists realized their current research on heredity was merely reproducing, so to speak, Mendel’s much earlier work. Near-simultaneous publications by three different botanists credited Mendel. An English translation of Mendel’s 1865 paper finally appeared in 1901.
Mendel is acknowledged today as the founder of genetics and the scientist who first uncovered the mechanism that had eluded Darwin and Wallace.—RA