Gregor Mendel
Gregor Mendel played a huge role in the underlying principles of
genetic
inheritance. Gregor was born, July 22 1822 in Heinzendorf, Austrian
Silesia (now
known as Hyncice, Czech Republic), with the name Johann Mendel.
He changed his
name to Gregor in 1843. He grew up in an Augustinian
brotherhood and he learned
agricultural training with basic education. He
then went on to the Olmutz
Philosophical Institute and later entered the
Augustinian Monastery in 1843.
After 3 years of theological studies,
Mendel went to the University of Vienna,
where 2 professors influenced him;
the physicist Doppler and a botanist named
Unger. Here he learned to
study science through experimentation and aroused his
interest in the causes
of variation in plants. He returned to Brunn in 1854
where he was a teacher
until 1868. Mendel died January 6 1884. In 1857, Mendel
began breeding garden
peas in the abbey garden to study inheritance, which lead
to his law of
Segregation and independent assortment. Mendel observed
several
characteristics of the garden peas which include: plant
height
(tallness/shortness), seed color (green/yellow), seed shape
(smooth/wrinkled),
seed-coat color (gray/white), pod shape
(full/constricted), pod color
(green/yellow), and flower distribution (along
length/ at end of stem). Mendel
keep careful records of his experiments and
first reported his findings at a
meeting of the Brunn Natural History
Society. The results of Mendel's work were
published in 1866 as "Experiments
with Plant Hybrids" in the society's
journal. Mendel's Law of Segregation
stated that the members of a pair of
homologous chromosomes segregate during
meiosis and is distributed to different
gametes. This hypothesis can be
divided into four main ideas. The first idea is
that alternative versions of
genes account for variations in inherited
characters. Different alleles will
create different variations in inherited
characters. The second idea is that
for each character, an organism inherits two
genes, one for each parent. So
that means that a homologous loci may have
matching alleles, as in the
true-breeding plants of Mendel's P generation
(parental). If the alleles
differ, then there will be F hybrids. The third idea
states that if the two
alleles differ, the recessive allele will have no affect
on the organism's
appearance. So an F hybrid plant that has purple flowers, the
dominant allele
will be the purple-color allele and the recessive allele would
be the
white-color allele. The idea is that the two genes for each
character
segregate during gamete production. Independent assortment states
that each
member of a pair of homologous chromosome segregates during
meiosis
independently of the members of other pairs so that alleles carried
on different
chromosomes are different distributed randomly to the gametes.
Mendel's work was
not recognized right away as an important scientific
breakthrough. In 1868
Mendel was promoted to abbot at the monastery and
gave up his experiments. Aside
from his fellow monks and his students his
work was ignored. In fact the
importance of Mendel's work was not discovered
until 1900, sixteen years after
his death. His work was discovered by three
European scientists: Hugo De Vries,
Carl Correns, and Erich Tschermak,
working independently as they preformed their
own similar experiments. They
credited Gregor Mendel as the discoverer of the
laws of heredity. In
conclusion, Mendel's work was very important to the science
community, and is
to this day being studied. All his work was done without
himself ever
receiving credit while he was alive. His laws of heredity are still
used
today and he now has received credit as the discoverer of the laws
of
heredity.