ABSTRACT
Gregor Mendel lived most of his adult life as a monk at the Saint Thomas Monastery in the city of Brno, the capital of Moravia, which at the time was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Today it is the second-largest city in the Czech Republic, with nearly 400,000 inhabitants. Mendel had been trained in science and mathematics at the University of Vienna and was a science teacher at the local Gymnasium (high school) until he became abbot of the Augustinian monastery in 1868. During his years there, he performed a series of breeding experiments on the common pea plant (Pisum sativum) in the greenhouses and gardens of the monastery. His results, which were published in 1865 by the Natural History Society of Brno in a paper with the modest title “Experiments in Plant Hybridization,” are today recognized as the starting point for all of modern genetics, in particular Mendelian genetics, the branch that bears his name. Essentially, Mendel discovered the principles of the inheritance of traits or characteristics within all sexually reproducing organisms, from fish to the members of the band Pfish. Let’s take a closer look at Mendel’s experiments, his results, and the explanatory model that he developed in order to explain his results and to build the foundation of Mendelian genetics. In so doing, we will see how Mendel’s work, and the understanding of the nature of inheritance that it allowed, solved the problems posed by Darwin’s mistaken ideas on blending inheritance.
