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Who is and What did Gregor Mendel Contribute
to the Science of Genetics
Gregor Mendel is now popularly called the Father of Genetics. The title is just fitting for one who founded the basic principles of heredity and variation in living organisms. He did not know it during his lifetime, but he was destined to become one of the most influencial persons to the growth of biology.
In 1962, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins jointly won the highly coveted Nobel Prize for having discovered the structure of the DNA, the “secret of life.” Rosalind Franklin would also have shared the prize had she lived (Phelan 2006).
Now the terms genetic engineering and genetically-modified organisms (GMO) have become popular terms in both plant and animal improvement and in biology as a whole. Cloning has also been exploited as a theme in the production of movies. But all these started with Mendel.
Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) was born Johann Mendel from poor farmer parents in Moravia, now part of the Czech Republic. He was quite exposed to growing plants during his boyhood. He helped in tending the gardens which supply food to the family. Hampered by poverty, his early education consisted mainly of instructions from an uncle.
At the age of twenty-one, he joined the monastery in his town of Brünn, now Brno, and he was ordained a monk by the name Gregor. Seeking to become a teacher like the rest of the monks, he took the qualifying exam but failed. He did it twice and likewise failed twice.
But the abbot (a leader) of the monastery was convinced that Gregor Mendel was intelligent and so he was sent to college. For two years from 1851 to 1853 Mendel studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna. Thereafter he taught science at the local secondary school, called gymnasium.
For eight years from 1858 to 1866 ( Rook 1964) Gregor Mendel conducted his experiments on garden pea (Pisum spp.), that would lead to the birth of a new science. His work has become the foundation of genetics, the science of heredity and variation in all living things. But the recognition did not happen when he was still alive.
The results of his experiments were first published in 1866 in an obscure publication, the Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brünn. But Mendel’s work was treated with almost total indifference by the scientific community. He read a report about his findings in a scientific meeting, but he was met with silence and simply ignored. For years his work was forgotten.
In 1868 he became the abbot of the monastery and he was compelled to abandon teaching in order to attend to his responsibilities. He also gave up all experimentation.
Then, in 1900, 34 years after Gregor Mendel published his findings and 16 years after his demise, several scientists proved him right. Working independently, Hugo de Vries in Holland, C. Correns in Germany, and E. Tshermak in Austria derived the same results as Mendel’s.
After learning of Mendel’s work, they credited him as the original of their findings. His derivations are now called the Mendelian Laws or Principles of Segregation and of Independent Assortment. These fundamental rules explain that traits are transmitted from generation to generation in uniform predictable fashion and not necessarily a blending process. With the expansion of the science of genetics, these laws have been supplemented and extended.
Just exactly why Gregor Mendel’s findings took years to be installed in their proper hierarchical place in the history of biology is now difficult to establish. But first, he worked and lived in isolation in a monastery. Unlike in universities where most researches were done, the monastery restricted exchange of ideas. Second, he is the first to combine mathematics with biology. But at the time, there was a large gap between biology and mathematics.
Third, his attempt started in 1866 to duplicate his results using a different test plant failed. This is because he used the hawkweed (Hieracium sp.) which he unknowingly knew reproduced seeds asexually through apomixis. Being apomictic, the species produce clones of the mother plants. It is only in rare cases that apomicts may also produce reduced egg cells which, if fertilized, results to sexual reproduction (Nogler 2006).
Mendel’s application of mathematics in biology was subsequently adopted by researchers like Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945) and co-workers. Their studies on fruit fly or Drosophila established the modern methodology in studies concerning genetics. It confirmed the gene (Mendel’s “factor”) as the unit of heredity and the chromosome as the physical structure which carried the genes. The subsequent discovery of mitosis, or nuclear division, and meiosis, or reduction division, as well as the manner in which the chromosomes are distributed further boosted the findings of Gregor Mendel (Rook 1964).
REFERENCES
NOGLER GA. 2006. The lesser-known Mendel: his experiments on Hieracium. In: Crow GF, Dove WF (editors). Perspectives: Anecdotal, Historical and Critical Commentaries on Genetics. Genetics. 172:1-6 (January 2006). Retrieved Jan. 2, 2011 from http://www.genetics.org/content/172/1/1.full.pdf+html.
PHELAN G. 2006. Double Helix: The Quest to Uncover the Structure of DNA. Washington, DC, USA: National Geographic Society. 60 p.
ROOK A (ed.). 1964. The Origins and Growth of Biology. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, Ltd. p. 294-311.
(Ben G. Bareja January 2012)
