Today is the birthday of Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, and it turns out that despite being a monk, he actually liked Darwin, a fact that was not liked by his friends in the monastery and the secret police in the Austro-Hungarian Empire
Gregor Johann Mendel was an Austrian monk and amateur biologist who researched the field of heredity, and his research became the basis of the theory of genetics.
Mendel was born as Johann on July 22, 1822 in Heisendorf, Austria (now the city of Hinchice in the Czech Republic). He was born into a poor farming family. At that time it was difficult for poor families to provide a good education for their children and the young Mandel had to go to the only place where he could escape a life of poverty - Entrance to a monastery in the city of Baron in Moravia (now Brno in the Czech Republic). Here he was given the name Gregor. This monastery belonged to the Augustinian order of St. Thomas, which was engaged in education and had a reputation as a place of scientific research.
The abbots of the monastery sent the young Mandel to the University of Vienna, to study teaching. However, he was impatient and the university did not consider him a good student. His lecturer wrote about him that "he lacks insight and the desire to understand knowledge." In 1853 he returned to the monastery as a failure. Since teaching was the purpose of the monastery, Mendel had to decide whether to stay in the monastery as a failed teacher or return, but where?
While in Vienna, Mendel was impressed by the work of a biologist named Frank Unger, whose practical view of heredity, free from spiritual influence, seemed to reflect his background as a farmer. This gave Mendel the idea to stay in the monastery and use the free time to carry out practical experiments in biology. He had to gently ask the abbots if they would allow it and the bishop refused to allow the monk to even teach biology.
After about two years, Gregor Mendel began his research on the hereditary variation and evolution of plants (he probably did not know this word because Darwin had not published the origin of species at that time). He chose to research the common garden pea - PISUM that he grew in the monastery courtyard.
Between the years 1856 and 1863 Mendel patiently grew and tested at least 28 thousand pea plants, and tested seven pairs of seeds for the purpose of comparing features such as the shape of the seed, its color, length and width, as well as tall and short plants.
Mendel worked on his research for several years and pollinated the plants himself to prevent pollination by insects. He collected the seeds produced from the plants and studied the offspring to see which traits they passed on and which they didn't.
Mendel discovered that by crossing tall and short parent plants, he produces a hybrid offspring that is more similar to the tall parent and does not get a mixture of average height. He explained this through a concept known as hereditary units - today they are called genes. They often show dominant or recessive characteristics. He created patterns of inheritance of a selection of traits and created two generalizations that became the laws of inheritance.
Mendel's observations led him to coin two terms that are still used by geneticists today: dominance - for a trait that is seen in the offspring, and recessiveness - a trait that is hidden by a dominant trait.
In 1866, Mendel published his findings in the field of heredity in the Journal of the Society for the History of Nature in Baron, the article had no effect. The complexity and detail of his work were not understood by influential people in the field such as Akrel Nagli. If Mendel had been a professional scientist, he might have promoted his work much more widely and perhaps published it outside his country. He made several attempts to contact scientists abroad to whom he made attempts to send them prints of his work but he struggled due to being an anonymous writer in an unknown journal.
Two years after the publication of his article, in 1868 he was elected head of the monastery and his work lay without influence for 34 years.
For the rest of his life he devoted himself to his duties in the monastery. He continued with several breeding experiments, this time with bees - progress for him because he always wanted to move from plants to animals. Mendel successfully produced a hybrid breed of bees that produced excellent honey, but they were very violent and stung all humans for many miles, so he had to destroy them. Some of Mendel's last works with hawkweed were incomplete due to the constraints of the monastery administration. Eventually, in the seventies of the 19th century, Mendel was forced to stop his experiments.
It seems that most of his time was devoted to the financial management of the monastery and not to religious duties. He was also considered untrustworthy by the Emperor's secret police. There were many in the monastery including the bishop who did not like what Mendel was doing, especially his interest and enthusiasm in the writings of Charles Darwin.
When Mendel died in 1884, the Czech composer Laus Janček played the organ at his funeral. The new abbot burned all of Mendel's papers.
Only in 1900 was his work rediscovered and its importance recognized by three independent researchers. One of them was the Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries. But it was only in the twenties and thirties of the 20th century that the full significance of his work was understood and he was recognized as the key to the field of heredity, when it was united with evolution for a synthesis.
After years of research in population genetics, scientists were able to explain Darwin's theory of evolution through changes in the gene frequency of Mendelian pairs of characteristics in populations between successive generations.
