A20 July 2022 marks the 200th anniversary of Gregor Mendel’s birthday. Hardly any figure in the history of modern biology has been discussed as controversially as he. In the ideological trench warfare of the 20th century, some saw him as a formalist who misled the development of the biological sciences, while others celebrated him as the far-sighted founder of a science of the century, classical genetics with its promises. Mendel’s legacy essentially consists of a single text, the “Experiments on Plant Hybrids”. Along the lines of this text, he is to be located in his time and visualized in his position in the history of science.
Few publications in the scientific experimental literature have achieved a comparable importance as the writing in which Mendel presented the results of his pea crossings in the fourth volume of the negotiations of the natural research association in Brno in 1866, which he had carried out over the past ten years in the spacious garden of his Augustinian monastery. What also gives the publication its unique aura is the fact that it only aroused the interest of the scientific public 35 years after its appearance. In this context, there has also been talk of a “rediscovery” of Mendel’s laws, which began around 1900 throughout Europe with the work of the botanists Hugo de Vries in Holland, Carl Correns in Germany, Erich Tschermak-Seysenegg in Austria and William Bateson in England and used in America. It was only now that the rules that Mendel’s pea generations followed were no longer interpreted as the special behavior of hybrids, but were elevated to a model for the inheritance process in general. Since then, Mendel’s 40-page work on plant hybrids has been read as the founding document of modern genetics. It has been reprinted and translated many times and to this day offers occasion for incessant attempts at interpretation.
The genetic researcher Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884) in a contemporary representation. On July 20, 2022 he would have been 200 years old.
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Image: dpa
In his biography of Mendels, Vítězslav Orel, the co-founder of the Mendelianum in Brünn – Brno in Czech – described in detail the agricultural development movement in Moravia in the 19th century. The Brno Augustinian monastery, to which Mendel belonged, and its lands played an important role in it. As a rule, however, breeders were interested in optimizing existing properties or creating new ones by selecting or crossing as many different varieties as possible in a wide range of vegetable, fruit and ornamental plants. The French plant breeder and acclimatization researcher Charles Naudin may serve as a prime example of this. Unlike most of his hybridizing contemporaries, however, Mendel’s work focused on creating varieties of a single species, the garden pea Pisum sativumto limit his observations to one or a few well-defined pairs of characters, while strictly controlling the crucial experimental intervention, the process of artificial insemination.