Hello friends, today I wanted to share with you a very important topic for all of us, and it is about the biography and life of a very important man, Gregor Mendel, who was considered the father of the genetics since he studies the inheritance in we humans, that is, the hereditary physical traits of our descendants.

Gregor Mendel

He was an Austrian monk whose experiments on the transmission of hereditary characters have become the foundation of the current theory of heredity. Mendel's laws explain the traits of the descendants, based on the knowledge of the characteristics of their parents.

Gregor Mendel was born on July 22, 1822 in Heizendorf (today Hyncice, Czech Republic), in the bosom of a peasant family. Family and economic difficulties forced him to delay his studies. He was a man of sickly build and humble and withdrawn character. The sociocultural environment influenced his scientific personality, mainly his direct contact with nature, his father's teachings about fruit crops and the relationship with. different professors throughout his life, especially Professor J. Scheider, expert in pomology.

On October 9, 1843 he entered as a novice in the convent of Brünn, known at the time for its great reputation as a center for studies and scientific work. After three years, at the end of his training in theology, he was ordained a priest on August 6, 1847. At first he was induced by his superior to dedicate himself to the field of pedagogy, but he chose a very different path. In 1851 he entered the University of Vienna, where he studied history, botany, physics, chemistry and mathematics, to graduate and practice as a professor of biology and mathematics. During his stay there he gave numerous classes as a substitute, in the subjects of mathematics, natural sciences and general sciences, with excellent approval among the students.



On October 9, 1843 he entered as a novice in the convent of Brünn, known at the time for its great reputation as a center for studies and scientific work. After three years, at the end of his training in theology, he was ordained a priest on August 6, 1847. At first he was induced by his superior to dedicate himself to the field of pedagogy, but he chose a very different path. In 1851 he entered the University of Vienna, where he studied history, botany, physics, chemistry and mathematics, to graduate and practice as a professor of biology and mathematics. During his stay there he gave numerous classes as a substitute, in the subjects of mathematics, natural sciences and general sciences, with excellent approval among the students.



However, once he finished his studies, he did not graduate, so he decided to return to the monastery of Abbot in 1854. Of a calm nature and mathematical mentality, he led an isolated life, devoted to his work. Later he was appointed professor at the Technical School of Brünn, where he spent most of his time researching the variety, inheritance and evolution of plants, especially pea, in a garden of the monastery for experiments. His contributions to the world of science are considered today as fundamental for the development of genetics.

Towards the end of his life, in 1868, Mendel was named abbot of his monastery, where he died on January 6, 1884 because of a renal and cardiac condition.

Mendel was fortunate to have, in his own monastery, the necessary material for his experiments. He began his work studying bees, collecting queens of all races, with which he carried out different types of crosses. Between 1856 and 1863 he carried out experiments on the hybridization of plants. He worked with more than 28,000 plants of different variants of the sweet pea or pea, analyzing in detail seven pairs of characteristics of the seed and the plant: the shape of the seed, the color of the cotyledons, the shape of the pod, the color of the immature pod, the position of the flowers, the color of the flowers and the length of the stem.

His exhausted experiments resulted in the formulation of two principles that would later be known as "laws of inheritance." His observations allowed him to coin two terms that continue to be used in today's genetics: dominant and recessive. "Factor" and "hybrid" are also two of the concepts established by Mendel of absolute validity at present.

In 1866, he published his fundamental work in a small informative bulletin of his city, under the title Essay on vegetable hybrids. In it he presented the formulation of the laws that bear his name. This essay contained a description of the large number of experimental crosses, thanks to which he was able to express numerically the results obtained and submit them to a statistical analysis.

Despite this detailed description, or perhaps for the same reason, his work had no response among the scientific community of his time. In fact, Mendel interchanged correspondence with one of the most eminent botanists of the moment, Carl Nágeli, although he did not seem very impressed by his work. He suggested that Mendel study other plants, such as the Hieracium hair, in which Nágeli was very interested.

Mendel followed his advice, but the experiments with Hieracium were inconclusive, since he found no consistent rules in the segregation of his characters, and began to believe that his results were of limited application. His faith and enthusiasm diminished, and due to the pressure of other occupations, in the 1870s he abandoned his experiments on heredity. It was not until much after the death of Mendel, in 1903, when it was discovered that a special type of parthenogenesis occurs in Hieracium, which produces deviations from the expected phenotypic and genotypic proportions.

It took thirty-five years for the forgotten Mendel monograph to come to light. In 1900 there was a rediscovery, almost simultaneously, of the laws of Mendel by three botanists: the Dutchman Hugo de Vries in Germany, Eric Von Tschermak in Austria and Karl Erich Correns in England. Amazed by the simple experimental approach and the quantitative analysis of their data, they repeated their experiments and verified the mathematical regularity of inheritance phenomena, by obtaining similar results. By knowing in a fortuitous way that Mendel had preceded them in their studies, they agreed to recognize him as the discoverer of the laws that bear his name.

The British William Bateson gave a great impulse to these laws, considering them as the basis of genetics (now called classical or Mendelian genetics), a term he coined in 1905 to designate the "science dedicated to the study of the phenomena of inheritance and variation of the beings ». In 1902, Boyen and Sutton discovered, independently, the existence of a similar behavior between the Mendelian principles and the chromosomes in meiosis. In 1909 the Danish Wilhelm Johannsen introduced the term «Gene» defining it as «a little word .., useful as an expression for the unique factors ... that has been shown to be in the gametes by modern researchers of Mendelism». However, it was not until the late 1920s and early 1930s that the true scope of Mendel's work was understood, especially in regard to evolutionary theory.

Well, really friends, I hope you have liked my post, and I invite you to visit my blog tomorrow as I will be explaining Mendel's theories. I would appreciate your votes, and I would like you to share this publication.


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