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Gregor Mendel
Life Details
Born: July 20th 1822. Died: January 6th 1884.
Introduction
Gregor Mendel is known as the Father of Genetics, due to his work breeding and cultivating pea plants. His work led the way to figuring out how dominant and recessive genes worked.
Early Life
Gregor Johann Mendel was born in July 1822 in Austria, to Anton and Rosine Mendel. He spent his first 11 years at home, being homeschooled, until a local schoolmaster noticed his apititude for learning. It was recommended that he attended a secondary school in order to continue his learning. The whole family moved to Troppau from what was then called Heinzendorf, which was a financial strain on the whole family. But, gaining the education he needed, and excelling at it, he graduated from school with honours in 1840.
Mendel spent three years studying physics and maths at the Philosophical Institute of the University of Olmütz. When he left in 1843, despite his family's best efforts to get him to lead the family farm, Mendel chose instead to become a monk, and enrolled at the Augustinian order at the St. Thomas Monastery in Brno. This opened up a lot of research and information for him to pursue and digest.
Mendel and Genetics
Gregor spent seven years working on his genetic processes and carried on an experimental part of the Abbey gardens started by the previous abbot. Mendel's meticulous record-keeping enabled him to figure out how dominant and recessive genese worked, by planting, cultivating and recording the end results of pea plants.
His first experiments focused on one trait at a time, and worked on gathering data for variations present for several generations. This was later called monohybrid experiments. He studied a total of seven characteristics. This study showed that some variation characteristics showed up more often than others. When he bred purebred peas, he noticed that one of the variations disappeared. He let the plants self-pollinate, and noted in his books what happened next: the next generation of plants showed a 3 to 1 ratio of the variations. This was later coined as a recessive gene, and the others were dominant, as it hid the characteristic.
Through this work, Mendel was able to figure the law of segregation. His findings concluded that each characteristic was controlled by two alleles - one from the mother, and one from the father plants. His findings also found that if there was no dominant variation, the recessive one would show through.
The Path to Evolution
Though his work was forgotten about until the early 1900s, Mendel's work on the pea plants was the forefront of genetic understanding. He had unknowingly provided a theory of evolution, with the mechanism for the passing down of genetic traits during natural selection. His work was collated with Charles Darwin's work on the Origin of Species to form the modern synthesis of the Theory of Evolution.
