Mendel

Gregor Johann Mendel (German: Gregor Johann Mendel, July 20, 1822 - January 6, 1884) was an Austrian biologist, meteorologist, mathematician, and Augustinian monk. He was posthumously known as the "Father of Modern Genetics." Mendel was born into a German-speaking peasant family in Silesia (now part of the Czech Republic) in the Austrian Empire. At the age of 21, he entered the St. Thomas Monastery in Brno, Moravia, and eventually became the abbot. Between 1856 and 1863, Mendel conducted a series of experiments on peas and established a number of genetic laws, which are now known as Mendel's laws of inheritance. Mendel selected seven pairs of pea traits for study: seed shape, flower color, cotyledon color, pod shape, immature pod color, flower placement position, and plant length. Taking seed color as an example, experiments show that when pure yellow peas are crossed with pure green peas, their offspring will always produce yellow seeds. However, in the next generation, green peas reappeared in a ratio of 1 green to 3 yellow. To explain this phenomenon, Mendel coined the terms "recessive" and "dominant" to describe traits (in the previous example, the green trait that seems to disappear in the offspring is recessive, and the yellow trait is dominant). He published research results in 1866 demonstrating that invisible factors (now called genes) could predict and determine the traits of organisms. For more than thirty years, little was known about Mendel's work. In 1900, Hugo de Vries, Carl Kollens, and Eric von Chermak independently verified Mendel's experimental results. The far-reaching significance of Mendel's discovery was recognized, thus opening a new era of modern genetics.