Gregor Mendel’s Law and His Life

Gregor Johann Mendel (20 July 1822–6 January 1884) was an Augustinian monk who served as the abbot of St. Thomas’ Abbey in Brno, Margraviate of Moravia. Mendel is considered the founder of modern genetics. He was born in a German-speaking family around the Silesian area of the Austrian Empire, which became Gregor Mendel’s nationality.

Though peasants had understood for centuries that interbreeding plants and animals might favour some desirable qualities, Mendel’s pea plant studies, which took place between 1856 and 1863, set up many principles of heredity that are now known as the rules of Mendelian genetics.

Gregor Mendel’s Biography

On the Moravian-Silesian border, Mendel was raised in a German-speaking household in Heinzendorf bei Odrau (now Hynice, Czech Republic) in the Austrian Empire.

He had two siblings: Veronica, his older sister, and Theresia, his younger one. He was the only son to Anton and Rosine (Schwirtlich) Mendel. They worked and lived on the Mendel family’s farm for at least 130 years (the house where Mendel was born is now a Mendel museum).

Mendel lived in a rural location, the son of a low-income family in German-speaking Silesia. His intellectual aptitude was discovered by the catholic pastor, who convinced his parents to enrol him in school when he was eleven years old.

Mendel laboured as a landscaper and learned beekeeping during his boyhood. He used to go to a gym in Troppau while he was young. Due to sickness, he had to take four months off from the gymnasium between 1840 and 1843.

He had become a monk partly so that he could get a degree despite having to spend it personally. As the son of a poor farmer, the orthodox church saved him the “perpetual concern over a means of subsistence,” as he put it. 

Contributions

After his initial investigations with pea plants, Mendel focused on seven qualities that appeared to be transferable independently of many others: seed shape, blossom hue, seed coat colour, pod shape, unripe pod tint, bloom location, and plant height. 

He began by examining the seed form, ranging from angular to spherical. Mendel cultivated and analysed roughly 28,000 plants, predominantly peas harvests, between 1856 and 1863. 

According to this study, when breeding different types were merged (e.g., tall plants fertilised by small plants), one out of every four pea plants had purebred recessive genes, two out of every four were hybrid, and one out of every 4 was purely dominant in the 2nd generation. 

Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance, which included the law of segregation and the Rule of independent assortment, were obtained from his experiments. Gregor Mendel’s laws still make the basics of genetic studies.

Rediscovery of Mendel’s work

Approximately forty scientists attended Mendel’s two seminal talks, yet they did not comprehend his work. He later corresponded with Carl Nägeli, a prominent scientist of the period, but Nägeli, like Mendel, did not see the significance of Mendel’s discoveries. 

“My time will come,” Mendel is known to have promised a companion, Gustav von Niessl when he was concerned about his work. 

Most scientists thought that all qualities were passed down the generations by blending heredity, which involved combining the attributes of each parent throughout Mendel’s lifetime.

Increasingly, the action of numerous genes with quantitative effects is being utilised to explain cases of this phenomenon. 

Charles Darwin sought but failed to explain heredity with his concept of pangenesis. Mendel’s theories were not fully appreciated until the twentieth century.

Mendel died of chronic nephritis on Jan 6th, 1884, in Brünn, Austria-Hungary (now named the Czech Republic), at 61. At his funeral, Czech composer Leo Janáek performed the organ. Following his death, the successor abbot burnt all of Mendel’s documents to put a stop to the taxing problems.

Conclusion

On July 22, 1822, he was born into a poor agricultural family in a hamlet in Northern Moravia, now in the Czech Republic. His family valued knowledge but lacked the financial means to take him to school, so he battled to make ends meet. 

Mendel’s scientific work halted once he was appointed the abbot in 1868, as he grew overloaded with administrative tasks, including a fight with the civil government over its effort to evy special tariff on religious organisations. 

When he died, he was regarded as a kind guy who liked flowers and maintained vast records on weather and stars. He is today known as the “Father of Genetics.”