Gregor Johann Mendel

Johann Mendel was born to an Austrian peasant family. His interest in botany began on the family farm, where he helped his father graft fruit trees. He studied philosophy, physics, and mathematics at the University Philosophical Institute in Olmutz. He was unsuccessful in finding a job, so he quit the school and returned to the farm. Depressed by the prospect of a bleak future, he became ill and stayed at home for a year.

Mendel later returned to Olmutz. After two years of study, he found the pressure of school and work to be too much, and his health again broke down. On the advice of his father and a professor, he entered the priesthood, even though he did not feel called to serve the church. His name was changed from Johann to Gregor.



Relieved of his financial difficulties, he was able to continue his studies. However, his nervous disposition interfered his pastoral duties, and he was assigned to substitute teaching. He enjoyed this work and was popular with the staff and students. But he failed the examination for the certification as a teacher. Ironically, his lowest grades were in biology. The Augustinians then sent him to the University of Vienna, where he become particularly interested in his plant physiology professor's unorthodox belief that new plant varieties can be caused by naturally arising variations. He was also fascinated by his classes in physics, where he was exposed to the physicist experimental and mathematical approach to their subject.

After further breakdown and failures, Mendel returned to monastery and was assigned the low-stress job of keeping the abbey garden. There he combined the experimental and mathematical approach of a physicist with his background in biology and performed a series of experiments designed to determined whether his professor was correct in his beliefs regarding the role of naturally arising variant in plants.

Mendel studied the transmission of specific traits of the pea plant - such as flower color and stem length - from parent plant to offspring. He pollinated the plant by hand and separated them until he had isolated each trait. For example, in his studies of flower color, he pollinated the plants until he produce pure red plants (plant that would produce only red-flowered offspring) and pure-white plants.

At the time, the accepted theory of heredity was that of blending. In this view, the characteristics of both parent blend together to form an individual. Mendel reasoned that if the blending theory was correct, the union of a pure-red pea plant and a pure-white pea plant would result in a pink-flowered offspring. However, his experiments showed that such a union consistently resulted in red-flowered offspring.

Mendel crossbred a large number of peas that had different characteristics. In many cases an offspring would have a characteristic of one of its parents, undiluted by that of the other parent. Mendel concluded that the question of which parent's characteristics would be passed on was a matter of chance, and he successfully used probability theory to estimate the frequency with which characteristics would be passed on. In so doing, Mendel founded modern genetics. Mendel attempted similar experiments were unsuccessful because he was unable control the mating behavior of the queen bee.

Mendel was ignored when he published his paper "Experimentation in Plant Hybridization." Sixteen years after his death, his work was rediscovered by three European botanist who had reached similar conclusions in plant breeding, and the importance of his work was finally recognized.

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wiki : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel