Johann Mendel's Life And Accomplishments

Johann Mandel was born on June 22, 1822 in Heinzendorf, Austria. His parents were poor farmers. From an early age, Johann was interested in science. At a young age, his schoolmaster encouraged him to attend a school in a larger town that was many miles away in order to gain more education. Since his family had a limited amount of money, it would be difficult to send him away. But because of his passion for learning, his family found a way to send him to Leipnik School to study for a year. Later, his teachers recommended a different school 20 miles away from his home. Mendel often went hungry due to his lack of money, but he still managed to finish his six-year course and even graduated with honors in 1840. Mendel wanted to farther his education

He noticed differences in pea plants, and decided to experiment with them. He choose seven different traits to observe in the pea plants: the form of ripe seeds, the color of the seed albumen, the color of the seed coat, the form of the ripe pods, the color of unripe pods, the position of flowers, and the length of the stem (Kendrick 1996). In order to correctly figure out what caused certain traits to appear, Gregor had to be very careful in his experiments. He said that the plants must "during the flowering period, be protected from the influence of all foreign pollen, or be easily capable of such protection [because] accidental impregnation by foreign pollen ... would lead to entirely erroneous conclusions." - J. G. Mendel (Kendrick 1996). He immediately noticed that when breeding two peas, a trait in one pea would not appear in the next generation, but would in the third generation. He concluded that the traits were being masked in the second generation and exhibited in the third. For example, if you breed a plant with green peas with a plant with yellow seeds, all their offspring will be yellow. In the next generation, the green peas will show up again. This proves that the yellow pea is dominant and the green pea is recessive. Years later, the Punnett Square was invented to help us better understand the idea of dominant and recessive traits. For years, Mendel did these experiments, carefully

Fisher said that Mendel’s results fit his theory more exactly than seemed statistically likely. In most cases where the classification of the pea plant was in doubt (Would a slightly dimpled seed be considered smooth or wrinkled?), Mendel may have chosen the classification that fitted the results he expected to see. Many other scientists disagree though, saying that Mendel handled thousands of pea plants, and a few uncertain seeds didn’t mean he was wrong. Another man even claims visiting Mendel, and seeing peas that had been altered. When he asked Mendel, he claims that Mendel said it was a little trick, and then changed the subject. Even if Mendel’s results were slightly too close to his theory, he was still correct about genes. That is why we consider Mendel the father of modern genetics. (Yount