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Gregor Mendel Facts

Gregor Mendel Facts
Gregor Johann Mendel (20 July 1822 to 6 January 1884) was a Moravian scientist and Augustinian friar is known as the founder of the modern science of genetics. Mendel's experiments with pea plants were conducted between 1856 and 1863 and established many of the rules of heredity.
Interesting Gregor Mendel Facts:
Johann Mendel was born in Heinzendorf bei Odrau in Moravia.
He grew up on a farm that had been in the family for over 130 years.
From 1840 to 1843 he studied philosophy and physics at the University of Olomouc Faculty of Philosophy.
He joined the Augustinian Friars and took the name Gregor.
He became a priest in 1847 and became a high school teacher in 1849.
From 1851 to 1853 he attended the University of Vienna where he studied biology, chemistry and physics.
After completing his studies in 1854 he returned to the monastery and for the next 16 years taught high school physics at a school in Brunn.
Mendel was interested in plant biology and heredity and between 1856 and 1863 he cultivated and tested some 29,000 pea plants in the monastery garden.
He catalogued the heredity of seven characteristics in peas: seed shape, flower color, seed coat tint, pod shape, unripe pod color, flower location and plant height.
His study revealed that one fourth of the plants had purebre recessive alleles, one half were hybrid and one fourth were purebred dominant.
These results led him to create the Law of Segregation which states that separate randomly from each other during the production of gametes so the offspring will inherit one allele from each parent.
The Law of Independent Assortment states that each pair of alleles segregates independently of the other pairs during gamete formation.
Most of Mendel's contemporaries believed that hereditary traits were passed on through a blending or averaging of each parents' characteristics and Mendel's findings were not accepted by the scientific community until after his death.
Mendel also experimented with honeybees and hawkweed but the results of the studies have not survived.
In 1865 he founded the Austrian Meteorological Society and more of his writings were about meteorology than about biology.


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