thomas rivera

gregor johann mendel

gregor johann mendel was born in 1822 and had two sisters. he was the middle
child and his family lived in a farm in moravia, which is now part of the czech republic.
he was a bright child and ambitious. his family had very little financial resources
however and this would prevent him from a higher education. and sometime he would be
subject to a psychosomatic illness that would immobilize him for weeks. although the rest
of the family did not have patience for him, his mother and younger sister cared for him.
his sister even gave him her share of the family estate so that when the graduated from
secondary school, he would be able to go the philosophical institute in the town of
olomouc. but even with his sister’s loan, he was unable to gain enough money to go to
university. if he wanted any further education he would have to become a monk. his
physics teacher, friedrich franz, was a friend of abbot napp at the monastery of st. thomas.
friedrich recommended napp to take mendel in and although he gave only a small hint of
his intellectual ability, napp agreed to take him in. mendel arrived at st. thomas in 1843,
at the age of twenty, and spent five years studying to become a priest. he started as a
novice and quickly moved up the steps, mainly because the church had a shortage of
priests. after his 25th birthday, mendel was a priest. it became apparent that he was too shy
to deal with all the problems that a priest would have to deal with. so napp decided that
mendel would be more useful as a teacher, so he sent mendel to znojmo to become a
teacher in mathematics. after being successful at teaching, mendel had hopes of becoming
a high school science teacher. but he failed the necessary oral exams which were needed
to pass. he tried retaking the tests but again failed because he disagreed with many of the
questions and wouldn’t give the expected answers. but if he had passed the tests and had
become a high school teacher, then he wouldn’t have had the time to experiment on
genetics. he was allowed to keep mice in his quarters and he preformed selective
breeding in order to learn about what determined the color of a mouse. but the local
bishop, anton ernst schaffgotsch, decided that doing selective breeding on mice was
similar to observing sexual congress. this actually helped mendel because mice were too
genetically advance to have been studied and if he had tried studying mice, mendel would
have gotten nowhere. so in 1854, mendel used the common pea. there was a garden in the
monastery and breeding pea plants was seen as agriculture at the time. the common pea,
unlike other plants, was hermaphroditic which meant that they could germinate
themselves. because pea plants were hermaphroditic, mendel could nearly completely
control the reproduction of the pea plants. but to do so meant lots of man work. he had to
move through the entire row of pea plants and remove the pollen by hand from the plants.
he was basically castrating each plant on which he carried out the operation. he would
then cover the buds with caps of calico cloth to protect them till the female part of the
plant to mature. the cap would also prevent other animals from pollinating the plant.
when the female part of the plant was mature, mendel would pollinate it with pollen from
gathered from another plant. nobody knew how mendel kept track of his work because
only his final paper was submitted to the agriculture society. all of his other papers were
burned in the courtyard of the monastery following his death. mendel had determined that
garden peas had seven distinct characteristics. before trying to cross the different varieties
of pea plants mendel spent two years growing plants of each variety and made sure that
each plant of each variety was “pure”. after doing this, he crossed plants carrying each of
one trait, with plants carrying the opposite traits. at that time, heredity was thought to be a
matter of averages. when a tall plant was crossed with a short plant, they would form a
medium sized plant was the common belief. mendel proved this wrong. when he crossed
a tall plant with a short plant, he always got a tall plant. from these results, mendel said
that there were some traits that were stronger than others. the stronger trait was called
dominant, and the weaker trait was called recessive. after studying these plants, he
decided to cross breed them again. but he got different results from what he expected.
most plants had the dominant traits, but some plants had recessive traits. he also
discovered that the ratio of plants with dominant traits and plants with recessive traits was
a ratio of 3:1. after this he experimented with other plants and found out that the results
held true for many different plants. he finished his pea plant experiments in 1863 which
was fortunate for him because the year later all of his plants were destroyed by the pea
weevil. also his physical condition would have made the job more difficult. his eye sight
was getting poorer and he was getting heavy because of the tasty and filling food he was
receiving at the time from the monastery’s well known cook. he spent two years writing a
paper that described his experiments. after finishing it he sent copies of the forty-four
page paper to many scientists. but many of them didn’t even bother to read his copies
because they considered him incorrect. in 1868, he was elected abbot of st. thomas. now
he had less time to experiment because he was busy working on his administrative and
social duties. he finally died in 1884, and would continue to be unrecognized until years
after his death. never less he is regarded as the father of genetics today.
thomas rivera
i give thanks to john malone and his book “it doesn’t take a rocket scientist: great
amateurs of science” for providing me with information on gregor johann mendel