Gregor Johan Mendel Biography

Gregor Mendel was an Augustinian monk, naturalist, and Catholic who formulated the laws of biological inheritance which bear his name, through work with various types of peas. The experiments that he carried out on the inheritance in plants are part of the point of origin of modern genetics.

He was born on July 20, 1822, in the town of Heinzendorf located north of Moravia, the Czech Republic, son of Gregor Mendel, his father, who was a veteran of the Napoleonic wars and his mother Rosine Mendel, daughter of a humble gardener. He was baptized as Johann Mendel. However, on October 9, 1843, he took the name of his father (Gregor) when he became an Augustinian friar in the convent of Augustinians of Brno. After almost 4 years of preparation in the monastery, Mendel was appointed priest on August 6, 1847.

Mendel was always interested in being a teacher, so in 1851 he traveled to Vienna where he did a Ph.D. in mathematics and science. A year later, Mendel began his teaching career as substitute professor at the Royal School of Brünn. However, in 1868, he would definitively abandon his work as professor and scientific researcher since he was appointed Abbot of the convent of Augustinians.

Mendel began his work on genetic experiments in 1856 when he made crosses with pea seeds, which resulted in different styles to the crusaders and some identical to them. He managed to find characters that expressed themselves in different ways according to the allele, whether recessive or dominant. He named dominant alleles to those that determine the effect of a gene and to the recessive ones by the characteristic of having no genetic effect on a heterozygous phenotype. The result of these experiments allowed him to discover in 1865 the 3 laws of inheritance, with which it is possible to discover the mechanisms of inheritance. The three laws that he established, state the following:

First law or principle of uniformity: “When two species of pure race cross, the descendants are all equal.”

Second law or principle of segregation: “Some individuals have the ability to transmit a character, even if they do not manifest themselves in them.” This explains that the individuals of a second generation, the descendants are divided into 4 and of which 3 inherit the dominant character and one inherits the recessive character.

Third law or principle of the independent combination: This law indicates everything related to the poly hybrid crossing, which indicates that, if the two varieties from which they split, differ from each other in 2 or more characters, each character is transmitted independently from the others.

On February 8 and March 8 of the year 1865, Mendel made two respective presentations of his work at the meetings of the Natural History Society of Brünn and subsequently published them as experiments on the hybridization of plants in 1866, results that were ignored and could not be understood and explained until 30 years later.

Gregor Mendel also carried out work in beekeeping with the aim of investigating the biological interest that bees have with flowers, which he carried out in the last 10 years of his life and with which he obtained several recognitions:

In 1871 he was an active member of the beekeeping society of Brünn and for what he was appointed president sometime later.

Between September 12 and 14, 1871, he was delegated by the beekeeping association of Brünn to attend, together with his friend Ziwansky, the German Beekeeping Congress held in Kiel.

Gregor Johan Mendel died on January 6, 1884, at the age of 62 due to chronic nephritis. Mendel will always be recognized by the broad legacy he left and by his magnificent discovery that today allows us to understand the transmission of genetic characteristics from parents to children.