Mendel, Gregor (Johann)

born July 22, 1822, Heinzendorf, Austria

died Jan. 6, 1884, Brünn, Austria-Hungary

Austrian botanist and plant experimenter.

He became an Augustinian monk in 1843 and later studied at the University of Vienna. In 1856, working in his monastery's garden, he began the experiments that led to his formulation of the basic principle of heredity. He crossed varieties of the garden pea that had maintained constant differences in such single alternative traits as tallness and dwarfishness, flower colour, and pod form. He theorized that the occurrence of the visible alternative traits of the plants, in the constant varieties and in their descendants, 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. He achieved fame only after his death, through the work of 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.

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