WHO IS HE?
He was born in Heizendorf,
today Hyncice, present Czech Republic, in 1822, and died in Brünn, today Brno,
in 1884).
It was an Austrian monk
and botanist who formulated the laws of biological heritage that take his
name. He experimented on the phenomena of heredity in plants, constituting the
starting point of genetics, one of the fundamental branches of biology.
After a childhood marked by
poverty, in 1843 he entered into the Augustinian monastery of Königskloster,
near Brünn, where he was given the name by which he is known and was ordained
priest in 1847.
He resided in the abbey of
St. Thomas (Brünn) and, in order to continue his teaching career, was sent to
Vienna, where he obtained a doctorate in mathematics and sciences (1851).
In 1854, he became a
substitute professor of the Royal School of Brünn, and in 1868 he was appointed
abbot of the monastery, abandoning scientific research definitively.
The most important of his
works (that began in 1856 from experiments of crosses with peas effected
in the garden of the monastery) allowed him to discover the three laws of
the inheritance, thanks to which it is possible to describe the mechanisms
of the inheritance .
In order to carry out his
work, he did not choose species, but self-breeding races of the species Pisum
sativum. The first phase of the experiment consisted of obtaining (by
cultivation) clean lines and collecting, in a methodical way, part of the seeds
produced by each plant.
He then crossed these
strains, two by two, using the technique of artificial pollination. In this way
it was possible to combine different varieties with very precise differences
between them (smooth seeds-wrinkled seeds, white flowers-colored flowers,
etc.).
The analysis of the results
obtained allowed to conclude that, by crossing breeds that differ in at least
two characters, new stable breeds can be created.
His research did not gain
recognition until the rediscovery of the laws of heredity by Hugo de Vries,
Carl E. Correns and E. Tschernack von Seysenegg, but they attributed to our
scientist the priority of discovery.
