The Monk and the Peas
How Gregor Mendel set the stage for our greatest scientific discoveries about DNA and genetics…
The monastery as a center of science
In the mid-1850s in a small town called Brno, then part of the Austrian Empire, an Augustinian monk named Gregor Mendel was quietly tending peas in the garden of the St. Thomas Monastery.
A few years earlier Mendel had completed his studies at the University of Vienna in mathematics and physics under Christian Doppler (who discovered the Doppler effect which we use today to measure the speed of cars and galaxies), and botany under Franz Unger (who hypothesized that some unknown components within plant cells determined their heredity, and proposed a theory of evolution prior to Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species).
Mendel’s gardening in Brno wasn’t your typical puttering in the dirt. This was actually a large experiment covering almost 5 acres of the monastery’s gardens, approved by the Abbot, Cyril Napp, in 1854. Mendel’s goal was to understand how hereditary characteristics were passed along in successive generations of hybrid progeny. At the time, the different traits of the parents were believed to be blended in the offspring, but that eventually, after many generations, the hybrid would revert to…
