ABSTRACT
Why is Mendel considered the father of genetics? Mendel made two contributions: (1) he proposed that hereditary material had a particulate nature, and (2) he proposed two "laws" for the distribution of these particles-the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment. It is also important to know what Mendel did not do. He did not comment on the chemical nature of the hereditary material (Friedrich Miescher, a Swiss contemporary of Mendel's, was just discovering nucleic acids), and he did not comment on the intracellular localization of the hereditary material (at the time not much was known about chromosomes, and the details of mitosis and meiosis were worked out between 1875 and 1900).
