HEROES OF SCIENCE
GREGOR MENDEL
This Austrian scientist is known as the ‘father of modern genetics’
WORDS AILSA HARVEY
This is the monastery in Brno, Czech Republic, where Mendel carried out his genetic experiments
Mendel combined his science expertise and experience of working as a gardener to unravel the basic principles of how you became you. Your genes are sequences of DNA passed from your parents onto you, determining all of your inherited traits. In the 19th century, the process of inheriting curly hair, a specific blood type or eye colour was thought to be caused by a merging of both of your parent’s genes.
Mendel – who spent eight years isolating each of a pea plant’s traits and pollinating them in different sequences – discovered many of the main rules of genetics. He revealed that each trait an individual has is made up of two units – one from each parent. One of these holds more power than the other and will be responsible for displaying that specific trait. This could be brown eyes over blue eyes, for example. In this case, the gene for brown eyes is dominant and the blue-eye gene is recessive. Mendel discovered that although the gene for blue eyes might not be visible in features, it still exists at a molecular level and can re-emerge in later generations.