Gregor Mendel’s Life and Contribution in Genetics

His first conclusion was his Law of Segregation, which said that dominant and recessive traits are passed down randomly from parents to offspring. He also provided and alternate way of heredity through his Law of Independent Assortment, which established the idea that traits were passed down independently from traits from parent to offspring. Although his work was overlooked for some period of time, his work later became appreciated by biologists and botanists who were also doing work on heredity.

Mendel’s work became the basis and formed the foundation of genetics, in the study of heredity.

Although all his work was done through experimentation with pea plants, his laws can be applied on all living organisms that exist today. With his work, people have been able to create anything as crops resistant to harsh weathers reducing the risk of famine, and been able to modify certain traits not just in agricultural life to our benefit. In medicine, doctors have been able to practice preventative medicine now that they know that certain people are at risk for certain diseases.

There’s a lot more things, just think how much Mendel’s help at understanding heredity has benefited the human race. Gregor Mendel was born Johann Mendel on July 22, 1822, to Anton and Rosine Mendel, on his family’s farm in Austria. He was given the name Gregor later on in life when he joined the St. Thomas Monastery in Brno. Once his brilliance was noticed by his local school teacher, he was sent to a secondary school in Troppau to continue his education.

The Mendels were somewhat poor, but they were able to find enough money for his tuition.

It was a hard strain on the family, and also a hard experience for the young Gregor Mendel who suffered of depression, but that didn’t keep his from excelling in his studies, and he graduated in 1840 with honors. He wanted to continue his education, and so he enrolled at the Philosophy Institute of Olomouc. After two years, he was recommended by one of his teachers to go to the St. Thomas Monastery, where he was seen to be of worth to become a monk by the head of the monastery. Here was where he adopted the name of Gregor, to follow tradition.

Even after joining the monastery at the age of 21, Gregor further pursued his education and went to the University of Vienna to continue his studies in science, at the monastery’s expense. Here he studied physics and mathematics under Christian Doppler, the same man that the Doppler effect wave frequency was named after. After finishing his studies in 1853 he came back to the monastery, and began teaching secondary school for about a decade, which is where he began most of his experiment which he is best known for.

Mendel did not begin his work on heredity using pea plants, but rather with mice. It was on mice on who he began his first experiments, due to his interest in the inheritance of the color of mice coats. He kept doing so until the head of the monastery, Abbot Nap, suggested that looking at mice mate wasn’t the best task for a religious Catholic monk, and so he switched to plants. Mendel chose to use pea plants for his experiment because offspring could be quickly produced, and so he didn’t have to wait too long for them to grow.

He cross fertilized pea plants that had opposite characteristics, such as tall with short, smooth to wrinkled, and those containing green seeds with those containing yellow seeds. It is here where he reached to his two most famous conclusions: The Law of Segregation, and the Law of Independent Assortment. Even though Mendel himself believed that this only applied to certain species and certain traits, it became the theory that this applies to all existing organisms.

When he was older Mendel became having problems with his eye sight, which kept him away from continuing his experiments. He died on January 6, 1884 at the age of 62. His funeral was well attended, but his work still remained very unknown. He too did not seem to promote much of his work, but not until about a decades later this his work become appreciated and his studies began to be called Mendel’s Laws. It is these laws that are the foundational principles in biology today.