Mendel, Gregor

Mendel, Gregor (Johann)

(born July 22, 1822, Heinzendorf, Austria—died Jan. 6, 1884, Brünn, Austria-Hungary) Austrian botanist and plant experimenter who laid the mathematical foundation of the science of genetics. He became an Augustinian monk in 1843 and later studied at the University of Vienna. In 1854, working in his monastery's garden, he began planning the experiments that led to his formulation of the basic principle of heredity. He used the edible pea for his studies, crossing varieties that had maintained constant differences in distinct traits such as height (tall or short) and seed colour (green or yellow). He theorized that the occurrence of the visible alternative traits, in the constant hybrids and in their progeny, was due to the occurrence of paired elementary units of heredity, now known as genes. What was new in Mendel's interpretation of his data was his recognition that genes obey simple statistical laws. His system proved to be of general application and is one of the basic principles of biology. His work was rediscovered in 1900 by three botanists, Carl Erich Correns, Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg, and Hugo de Vries, who independently obtained similar results and found that both the experimental data and the general theory had been published 34 years previously.