The earliest known systematic experiments in genetics were performed by an Augustinian monk named Gregor Mendel (1823–84). Although his work was presented and recorded in a scientific proceeding in 1865, not many people heard about it until more than three decades later. The scientific society and its proceedings, where the work was originally described, were obscure, and no one in mainstream science at the time saw it or paid attention.
Working in the garden of a monastery in Brünn, Austria (modern-day Brno, Czech Republic), Mendel performed carefully controlled experiments on inheritance in common garden pea plants. Mendel studied seven characteristics of the pea plants, including red versus white flower color, tall versus short, and smooth versus wrinkled seed texture.
By crossing plants with known characteristics in controlled breeding experiments and recording the numbers of offspring that had each of the characteristics, Mendel was able to infer how the characteristics were being inherited. He proposed the concept of the gene as the unit of inheritance of these characteristics, and he hypothesized that each individual has a pair of genes for each characteristic, one inherited at random from each parent. His fundamental discoveries are now often known as Mendel’s laws, and simple inheritance patterns in families are sometimes called “Mendelian.”
