Mendel as the Father of Genetics: Who is Gregor Mendel?

Johann Gregor Mendel was born on July 22, 1822, in Heinzendorf, Czechoslovakia, Silesia. He was the only son of a family of three children settled in Czech and German-speaking Silesia. Mendel's father was a farmer and his mother was the daughter of a family that had been gardening for generations. Mendel learned all the tricks of growing plants from his father at a very young age.

Mendel was sent to a high school in Leipnik in 1833 and a year later in Trappav. Here he attracted attention with his outstanding success. After receiving his high school diploma in 1840, he followed philosophy courses at Olmütz University to prepare for university education.

Due to his family's limited economic conditions, he was able to continue his two-year education at the university by spending some of the dowry money of his younger brother Theresia. In 1843, at the suggestion of his physics professor, Mendel entered the monastery of the Augustinian order in Brünn and took the name Gregordini. Between 1844 and 1848, while he was studying religion, he also followed agriculture-oriented courses at the Philosophy Institute of the monastery. He became a priest in 1847 and briefly worked in a hospital. Mendel was later appointed as a substitute teacher at a school in Znaim, near Brünn, in 1849. He decided to become a natural science teacher. He lost this chance when he could not succeed in geology and zoology in the university exams he entered in 1850 for this purpose. However, with the support of the monastic authorities, he was sent to the University of Vienna to increase his knowledge.

Between 1851 and 1853 he studied at this institution, in addition to natural sciences and botany, as well as statistical methods that would be useful to him in his later research. Mendel was appointed substitute teacher for physics and natural history classes at the Brünn Technical School in 1854. He continued his plant hybridization studies, which he started in this period, until 1861. Since he was appointed chief priest of the monastery that year, he greatly reduced his lack of time for scientific research.

19th century At the time Darwin's theory of natural selection was spreading in the middle of the middle ages, the problem of how the characteristics of a living species could be transmitted to its descendants arose with new intensity. After Mendel obtained pure breeds with opposite characteristics, he crossed them. For example, he crossed yellow peas with greens, and flat-topped seeds with rough ones. All the seeds he obtained were flat and yellow; this feature did not change. It was then that Mendel realized that one of these contrasting traits was dominant over the other, regardless of sex. His various observations on various strains of peas led him to generalize the "Law of Dominance".

If two variants of a trait are found in the same individual, only one is fully manifested. He called the traits seen in the first generation the dominant trait. He called the opposite traits recessive traits. He gave the name F1, abbreviated to the first flial generation, to individuals formed from the combination of two pure breeds. He obtained F2 offspring by pollinating F1 individuals among themselves. Mendel observed the emergence of both dominant and recessive traits in F2. The ratio of dominant and recessive traits was almost constant and equal to 3:1. He had 1850 square peas against 5474 round peas in F2, so the ratio was about 1/3.

Mendel, with his painstaking studies on peas, discovered the principles of heredity that lead geneticists today. But these principles were published much later. (1886) At that time, scientists did not have enough information on chromosomes, so this invention did not attract their attention for a long time. In 1876, Eduar Strasburger revealed the chromosomal details of mitosis, and in 1887, Eduard Van Beneden revealed the importance and functioning of meiosis. In the same years, Weismann found that the number of chromosomes in gametes is half the number in soma cells. Based on these available data, it was predicted that the inheritance material theoretically accumulates in chromosomes, and it was determined that traits would be passed on to offspring at a predicted rate from crossing of different ancestors. Mendel got the same result from his experiments on other plants. He later confirmed his genetic theory in experiments that biologists conducted on insects, fish, birds, and mammals.

Johann Gregor Mendel died in 1884 in Brünn in Moravia (today Brno in Czechoslovakia). Mendel's studies of heredity were resurrected in 1900 by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns and cited in their papers. Thus, the science of genetics emerged with the work of Mendel.