Untitled Essay, Research Paper

Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk, whose experimental work becamethe steeping stones for the field of heredity,today. Mendel was born on July 22, 1822, to a poor family in Heinzendorf(which is now Hyncice, Czech Republic). He entered the Augustinianmonastery at Br?nn (which is now Brno, Czech Republic), which wasknown as a center of learning and scientific research. He later became ateacher at the technical school in Br?nn. There Mendel becameinterested in investigating variation, heredity, and evolution in plants atthe monastery’s experimental garden. Between 1856 and 1863 he grewand tested at least 28,000 pea plants, carefully analyzing seven pairs ofseed and plant characteristics. His expensive and time-consumingexperiments resulted in generalizations that later became known as thelaws of heredity, or Mendel?s Laws. His observations also led him to cointwo terms still used in present-day genetics: dominance, for a trait thatshows up in an offspring; and recessiveness, for a trait masked by adominant gene. Mendel published his important work on heredity in 1866.Becauseof, its descriptions of large numbers of experimental plants, whichallowed him to express his results numerically and subject them tostatistical analysis, this work made virtually no impression for the next 34years. Only in 1900 was his work recognized by three investigators, oneof whom was the Dutch botanist Hugo De Vries.Not until the late 1920sand the early ’30s was its full possibility and meaning realized, particularlyin relation to evolutionary theory. As a result of years of research inpopulation genetics, investigators were able to demonstrate that evolutioncan be described in terms of the change in gene frequency of Mendelianpairs of characteristics in a population over successive generations. Mendel’s later experiments with the hawkweed Hieracium provedinconclusive, and because of the pressure of other duties he ceased hisexperiments on heredity by the 1870s. He died in Br?nn on January 6,1884.