Gregor Johann Mendel,
OSA
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(; cs, Řehoř Jan Mendel;
[Funeral card in Czech (Brno, 6. January 1884)](_blank)
/ref> 20 July 1822 – 6 January 1884) was a biologist, meteorologist, mathematician, Augustinian friar
A friar is a member of one of the mendicant orders founded in the twelfth or thirteenth century; the term distinguishes the mendicants' itinerant apostolic character, exercised broadly under the jurisdiction of a superior general, from the o ...
and abbot
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of St. Thomas' Abbey in Brünn (''Brno''), Margraviate of Moravia. Mendel was born in a German-speaking
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family in the Silesian Silesian as an adjective can mean anything from or related to Silesia. As a noun, it refers to an article, item, or person of or from Silesia.
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part of the Austrian Empire
The Austrian Empire (german: link=no, Kaiserthum Oesterreich, modern spelling , ) was a Central- Eastern European multinational great power from 1804 to 1867, created by proclamation out of the realms of the Habsburgs. During its existence ...
(today's Czech Republic
The Czech Republic, or simply Czechia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Historically known as Bohemia, it is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the southeast. Th ...
) and gained posthumous recognition as the founder of the modern science of genetics
Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinian friar worki ...
. Though farmers had known for millennia that crossbreeding of animals and plants could favor certain desirable traits, Mendel's pea plant experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 established many of the rules of heredity
Heredity, also called inheritance or biological inheritance, is the passing on of traits from parents to their offspring; either through asexual reproduction or sexual reproduction, the offspring cells or organisms acquire the genetic inform ...
, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance.
Mendel worked with seven characteristics of pea plants: plant height, pod shape and color, seed shape and color, and flower position and color. Taking seed color as an example, Mendel showed that when a true-breeding yellow pea and a true-breeding green pea were cross-bred their offspring always produced yellow seeds. However, in the next generation, the green peas reappeared at a ratio of 1 green to 3 yellow. To explain this phenomenon, Mendel coined the terms " recessive" and " dominant" in reference to certain traits. In the preceding example, the green trait, which seems to have vanished in the first filial generation, is recessive and the yellow is dominant. He published his work in 1866, demonstrating the actions of invisible "factors"—now called gene
In biology, the word gene (from , ; "... Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word gene to describe the Mendelian units of heredity..." meaning ''generation'' or ''birth'' or ''gender'') can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a b ...
s—in predictably determining the traits of an organism.
The profound significance of Mendel's work was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century (more than three decades later) with the rediscovery of his laws. Erich von Tschermak, Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns independently verified several of Mendel's experimental findings in 1900, ushering in the modern age of genetics.
Early life and education
Mendel was born into a German-speaking
German ( ) is a West Germanic language mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italian province of South Tyrol. It is a ...
family in Heinzendorf bei Odrau (now Hynčice, Czech Republic
The Czech Republic, or simply Czechia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Historically known as Bohemia, it is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the southeast. Th ...
), at the Moravian-Silesian Silesian as an adjective can mean anything from or related to Silesia. As a noun, it refers to an article, item, or person of or from Silesia.
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* Silesians, inhabitants of Silesia, either a West S ...
border, Austrian Empire
The Austrian Empire (german: link=no, Kaiserthum Oesterreich, modern spelling , ) was a Central- Eastern European multinational great power from 1804 to 1867, created by proclamation out of the realms of the Habsburgs. During its existence ...
. He was the son of Anton and Rosine (Schwirtlich) Mendel and had one older sister, Veronika, and one younger, Theresia. They lived and worked on a farm which had been owned by the Mendel family for at least 130 years (the house where Mendel was born is now a museum devoted to Mendel). During his childhood, Mendel worked as a gardener and studied beekeeping. As a young man, he attended gymnasium in Troppau (now Opava, Czech Republic). He had to take four months off during his gymnasium studies due to illness. From 1840 to 1843, he studied practical and theoretical philosophy and physics at the Philosophical Institute of the University of Olmütz (now Olomouc, Czech Republic), taking another year off because of illness. He also struggled financially to pay for his studies, and Theresia gave him her dowry. Later he helped support her three sons, two of whom became doctors.
He became a monk in part because it enabled him to obtain an education without having to pay for it himself. As the son of a struggling farmer, the monastic life, in his words, spared him the "perpetual anxiety about a means of livelihood." Born Johann Mendel, he was given the name Gregor ( in Czech) when he joined the Order of Saint Augustine.
Academic career
When Mendel entered the Faculty of Philosophy, the Department of Natural History and Agriculture was headed by Johann Karl Nestler
Johann Karl Nestler, cs, Jan Karel Nestler (16 December 1783 – 9 July 1842) was an Austrian scientist in the field of hereditary traits, professor of natural history and agriculture at the Philosophical Faculty of University of Olomouc, dean ...
who conducted extensive research of hereditary traits of plants and animals, especially sheep. Upon recommendation of his physics teacher Friedrich Franz, Mendel entered the Augustinian St Thomas's Abbey in Brünn (now Brno, Czech Republic) and began his training as a priest. Mendel worked as a substitute high school teacher. In 1850, he failed the oral part, the last of three parts, of his exams to become a certified high school teacher. In 1851, he was sent to the University of Vienna to study under the sponsorship of Abbot
Abbot is an ecclesiastical title given to the male head of a monastery in various Western religious traditions, including Christianity. The office may also be given as an honorary title to a clergyman who is not the head of a monastery. Th ...
so that he could get more formal education. At Vienna, his professor of physics was Christian Doppler. Mendel returned to his abbey in 1853 as a teacher, principally of physics. In 1856, he took the exam to become a certified teacher and again failed the oral part. In 1867, he replaced Napp as abbot of the monastery.
After he was elevated as abbot in 1868, his scientific work largely ended, as Mendel became overburdened with administrative responsibilities, especially a dispute with the civil government over its attempt to impose special taxes on religious institutions. Mendel died on 6 January 1884, at the age of 61, in Brünn, Moravia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic), from chronic nephritis
Nephritis is inflammation of the kidneys and may involve the glomeruli, tubules, or interstitial tissue surrounding the glomeruli and tubules. It is one of several different types of nephropathy.
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* Glomerulonephritis is inflammation of th ...
. Czech composer Leoš Janáček
Leoš Janáček (, baptised Leo Eugen Janáček; 3 July 1854 – 12 August 1928) was a Czech composer, musical theorist, folklorist, publicist, and teacher. He was inspired by Moravian and other Slavic musics, including Eastern European ...
played the organ at his funeral. After his death, the succeeding abbot burned all papers in Mendel's collection, to mark an end to the disputes over taxation. The exhumation of Mendel's corpse in 2021 delivered some physiognomic details like body height (). His genome was analysed, revealing that Mendel also suffered from heart problems.
Contributions
Experiments on plant hybridization
Mendel, known as the "father of modern genetics", chose to study variation in plants in his monastery's experimental garden.
After initial experiments with pea plants, Mendel settled on studying seven traits that seemed to be inherited independently of other traits: seed shape, flower color, seed coat tint, pod shape, unripe pod color, flower location, and plant height. He first focused on seed shape, which was either angular or round. Between 1856 and 1863 Mendel cultivated and tested some 28,000 plants, the majority of which were pea plants ('' Pisum sativum''). This study showed that, when true-breeding different varieties were crossed to each other (e.g., tall plants fertilized by short plants), in the second generation, one in four pea plants had purebred recessive traits, two out of four were hybrids, and one out of four were purebred dominant. His experiments led him to make two generalizations, the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment, which later came to be known as Mendel's Laws of Inheritance.
Initial reception of Mendel's work
Mendel presented his paper, (" Experiments on Plant Hybridization"), at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brno in Moravia on 8 February and 8 March 1865. It generated a few favorable reports in local newspapers, but was ignored by the scientific community. When Mendel's paper was published in 1866 in , it was seen as essentially about hybridization rather than inheritance, had little impact, and was only cited about three times over the next thirty-five years. His paper was criticized at the time, but is now considered a seminal work. Notably, Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin ( ; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English natural history#Before 1900, naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all speci ...
was not aware of Mendel's paper, and it is envisaged that if he had been aware of it, genetics as it exists now might have taken hold much earlier. Mendel's scientific biography thus provides an example of the failure of obscure, highly original innovators to receive the attention they deserve.
Rediscovery of Mendel's work
About forty scientists listened to Mendel's two groundbreaking lectures, but it would appear that they failed to understand his work. Later, he also carried on a correspondence with Carl Nägeli, one of the leading biologists of the time, but Nägeli too failed to appreciate Mendel's discoveries. At times, Mendel must have entertained doubts about his work, but not always: "My time will come," he reportedly told a friend, Gustav von Niessl.
During Mendel's lifetime, most biologists held the idea that all characteristics were passed to the next generation through blending inheritance, in which the traits from each parent are averaged. Instances of this phenomenon are now explained by the action of multiple genes with quantitative effects. Charles Darwin tried unsuccessfully to explain inheritance through a theory of pangenesis. It was not until the early 20th century that the importance of Mendel's ideas was realized.
By 1900, research aimed at finding a successful theory of discontinuous inheritance rather than blending inheritance led to independent duplication of his work by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns, and the rediscovery of Mendel's writings and laws. Both acknowledged Mendel's priority, and it is thought probable that de Vries did not understand the results he had found until after reading Mendel. Though Erich von Tschermak was originally also credited with rediscovery, this is no longer accepted because he did not understand Mendel's laws
Mendelian inheritance (also known as Mendelism) is a type of biological inheritance following the principles originally proposed by Gregor Mendel in 1865 and 1866, re-discovered in 1900 by Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns, and later popularize ...
. Though de Vries later lost interest in Mendelism, other biologists started to establish modern genetics as a science. All three of these researchers, each from a different country, published their rediscovery of Mendel's work within a two-month span in the spring of 1900.
Mendel's results were quickly replicated, and genetic linkage quickly worked out. Biologists flocked to the theory; even though it was not yet applicable to many phenomena, it sought to give a genotypic understanding of heredity which they felt was lacking in previous studies of heredity, which had focused on phenotypic approaches. Most prominent of these previous approaches was the biometric school of Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson (; born Carl Pearson; 27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) was an English mathematician and biostatistician. He has been credited with establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics. He founded the world's first university st ...
and W. F. R. Weldon
Walter Frank Raphael Weldon FRS (15 March 1860 – 13 April 1906), was an English evolutionary biologist and a founder of biometry. He was the joint founding editor of '' Biometrika'', with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson.
Family
Weldon was ...
, which was based heavily on statistical studies of phenotype variation. The strongest opposition to this school came from William Bateson
William Bateson (8 August 1861 – 8 February 1926) was an English biologist who was the first person to use the term genetics to describe the study of heredity, and the chief populariser of the ideas of Gregor Mendel following their rediscover ...
, who perhaps did the most in the early days of publicising the benefits of Mendel's theory (the word "genetics
Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinian friar worki ...
", and much of the discipline's other terminology, originated with Bateson). This debate between the biometricians and the Mendelians was extremely vigorous in the first two decades of the 20th century, with the biometricians claiming statistical and mathematical rigor, whereas the Mendelians claimed a better understanding of biology. Modern genetics shows that Mendelian heredity is in fact an inherently biological process, though not all genes of Mendel's experiments are yet understood.
In the end, the two approaches were combined, especially by work conducted by R. A. Fisher as early as 1918. The combination, in the 1930s and 1940s, of Mendelian genetics with Darwin's theory of natural selection
Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Cha ...
resulted in the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology.
Other experiments
Mendel began his studies on heredity using mice. He was at St. Thomas's Abbey but his bishop did not like one of his friars studying animal sex, so Mendel switched to plants. Mendel also bred bees in a bee house that was built for him, using bee hives that he designed. He also studied astronomy
Astronomy () is a natural science that studies astronomical object, celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and chronology of the Universe, evolution. Objects of interest ...
and meteorology, founding the 'Austrian Meteorological Society' in 1865. The majority of his published works were related to meteorology.
Mendel also experimented with hawkweed (''Hieracium'') and honeybees
A honey bee (also spelled honeybee) is a eusocial flying insect within the genus ''Apis'' of the bee clade, all native to Afro-Eurasia. After bees spread naturally throughout Africa and Eurasia, humans became responsible for the current cosmo ...
. He published a report on his work with hawkweed, a group of plants of great interest to scientists at the time because of their diversity. However, the results of Mendel's inheritance study in hawkweeds was unlike his results for peas; the first generation was very variable and many of their offspring were identical to the maternal parent. In his correspondence with Carl Nägeli he discussed his results but was unable to explain them. It was not appreciated until the end of the nineteenth century that many hawkweed species were apomictic, producing most of their seeds through an asexual process.
None of his results on bees survived, except for a passing mention in the reports of Moravian Apiculture Society. All that is known definitely is that he used Cyprian and Carniolan bees, which were particularly aggressive to the annoyance of other monks and visitors of the monastery such that he was asked to get rid of them. Mendel, on the other hand, was fond of his bees, and referred to them as "my dearest little animals".
He also described novel plant species
In biology, a species is the basic unit of Taxonomy (biology), classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of ...
, and these are denoted with the botanical author abbreviation
In botanical nomenclature, author citation is the way of citing the person or group of people who validly published a botanical name, i.e. who first published the name while fulfilling the formal requirements as specified by the ''International Cod ...
"Mendel".
Mendelian paradox
In 1936, Ronald Fisher, a prominent statistician and population geneticist, reconstructed Mendel's experiments, analyzed results from the F2 (second filial) generation and found the ratio of dominant to recessive phenotypes (e.g. yellow versus green peas; round versus wrinkled peas) to be implausibly and consistently too close to the expected ratio of 3 to 1. Fisher asserted that "the data of most, if not all, of the experiments have been falsified so as to agree closely with Mendel's expectations." Mendel's alleged observations, according to Fisher, were "abominable", "shocking", and "cooked".
Other scholars agree with Fisher that Mendel's various observations come uncomfortably close to Mendel's expectations. A. W. F. Edwards, for instance, remarks: "One can applaud the lucky gambler; but when he is lucky again tomorrow, and the next day, and the following day, one is entitled to become a little suspicious". Three other lines of evidence likewise lend support to the assertion that Mendel's results are indeed too good to be true.
Fisher's analysis gave rise to the Mendelian paradox: Mendel's reported data are, statistically speaking, too good to be true, yet "everything we know about Mendel suggests that he was unlikely to engage in either deliberate fraud or in unconscious adjustment of his observations." A number of writers have attempted to resolve this paradox.
One attempted explanation invokes confirmation bias. Fisher accused Mendel's experiments as "biased strongly in the direction of agreement with expectation ..to give the theory the benefit of doubt". In his 2004 article, J.W. Porteous concluded that Mendel's observations were indeed implausible. However, reproduction of the experiments has demonstrated that there is no real bias towards Mendel's data.
Another attempt to resolve the Mendelian paradox notes that a conflict may sometimes arise between the moral imperative of a bias-free recounting of one's factual observations and the even more important imperative of advancing scientific knowledge. Mendel might have felt compelled "to simplify his data in order to meet real, or feared, editorial objections." Such an action could be justified on moral grounds (and hence provide a resolution to the Mendelian paradox), since the alternative—refusing to comply—might have retarded the growth of scientific knowledge. Similarly, like so many other obscure innovators of science, Mendel, a little known innovator of working-class background, had to "break through the cognitive paradigms and social prejudices" of his audience. If such a breakthrough "could be best achieved by deliberately omitting some observations from his report and adjusting others to make them more palatable to his audience, such actions could be justified on moral grounds."
Daniel L. Hartl and Daniel J. Fairbanks
Daniel Justin Fairbanks (born 1956) is an American biologist who was formerly a dean of Undergraduate Education at Brigham Young University (BYU). He is a specialist in biology who has written books on the subject.
Early life and education
Fairb ...
reject outright Fisher's statistical argument, suggesting that Fisher incorrectly interpreted Mendel's experiments. They find it likely that Mendel scored more than 10 progeny, and that the results matched the expectation. They conclude: "Fisher's allegation of deliberate falsification can finally be put to rest, because on closer analysis it has proved to be unsupported by convincing evidence." In 2008 Hartl and Fairbanks (with Allan Franklin and AWF Edwards) wrote a comprehensive book in which they concluded that there were no reasons to assert Mendel fabricated his results, nor that Fisher deliberately tried to diminish Mendel's legacy. Reassessment of Fisher's statistical analysis, according to these authors, also disproves the notion of confirmation bias in Mendel's results.
Commemoration
Mount Mendel in New Zealand's Paparoa Range was named after him in 1970 by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.
See also
* List of Roman Catholic cleric–scientists
* Mendel Museum of Genetics
* Mendel Polar Station
Mendel Polar Station is a Czech research station in Antarctica on the coast of James Ross Island. It was founded by a Czech polar explorer Pavel Prošek. The official opening ceremony took place in February 2007 and made the Czech Republic t ...
in Antarctica
* Mendel University Brno
* Mendelian error
* '' The Gardener of God'', an Italian docudrama about the life and works of Gregor Mendel
References
Further reading
* William Bateson
William Bateson (8 August 1861 – 8 February 1926) was an English biologist who was the first person to use the term genetics to describe the study of heredity, and the chief populariser of the ideas of Gregor Mendel following their rediscover ...
On-line Facsimile Edition: Electronic Scholarly Publishing, Prepared by Robert Robbins
* Hugo Iltis
Hugo Iltis (April 11, 1882 – June 22, 1952) was a Czech-American biologist.
Life and work
Iltis was born on April 11, 1882, in Brno, Moravia, Austria-Hungary. His family was of Jewish descent, and the family name translates as "polecat". He wa ...
, ''Gregor Johann Mendel. Leben, Werk und Wirkung''. Berlin: J. Springer. 426 pages. (1924)
**Translated by Eden
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and Cedar Paul as ''Life of Mendel''. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1932. 336 pages. New York: Hafner, 1966: London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1976.
**Translated by Zhenyao Tan as ''Mên-tê-êrh chuan''. Shanghai: Shang wu yin shu guan, 1924. 2 vols. in 1, 661 pp. Shanghai: Shang wu yin shu guan, Minguo 25 936
**Translated as ''Zasshu shokubutsu no kenkyū. Tsuketari Menderu shōden''. Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten, Shōwa 3 928 100 pp. Translated by Yuzuru Nagashima as ''Menderu no shōgai''. Tōkyō: Sōgensha, Shōwa 17 942 ''Menderu den''. Tōkyō: Tōkyō Sōgensha, 1960.
*
* Robert Lock, ''Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, Heredity and Evolution'', London, 1906
*
* (1st Pub. 1905)
* Curt Stern and Sherwood ER (1966) ''The Origin of Genetics''.
*
*
* refutes allegations about "data smoothing"
* James Walsh, ''Catholic Churchmen in Science'', Philadelphia: Dolphin Press, 1906
*
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External links
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*
*
1913 Catholic Encyclopedia entry, "Mendel, Mendelism"
Augustinian Abbey of St. Thomas at Brno
Biography, bibliography and access to digital sources
in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Biography of Gregor Mendel
GCSE student
Gregor Mendel Primary Sources
* Brno Now
Mendel Museum of Genetics
Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mendel, Gregor
1822 births
1884 deaths
People from Nový Jičín District
People from Austrian Silesia
Silesian-German people
Czech Roman Catholics
Augustinian friars
Austrian abbots
Austrian biologists
19th-century Austrian botanists
Austrian geneticists
Botanists with author abbreviations
Czech biologists
Czech botanists
Catholic clergy scientists
Catholic philosophers
19th-century Austrian Roman Catholic priests
Palacký University Olomouc alumni
Deaths from nephritis
Burials at Brno Central Cemetery