Thinkers Timeline

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) was an Augustinian friar, botanist, and the founder of genetics. He was born Johann Mendel in what is now the Czech Republic, in a region then part of the Austrian Empire. His family were farmers and he grew up working in the fields and learning about plants from an early age. He entered the Augustinian monastery at Brno in 1843, taking the name Gregor, and was sent to the University of Vienna, where he studied mathematics, physics, and natural history. He returned to the monastery, taught at the local high school, and devoted his spare time to a series of careful experiments on pea plants in the monastery garden. Between 1856 and 1863 he grew and analysed around ten thousand pea plants, tracking the inheritance of seven distinct traits across multiple generations. He presented his findings to the local natural history society in 1865 and published them in 1866. His paper was politely received and then essentially forgotten. He became abbot of the monastery in 1868 and spent the rest of his life in administrative work, never knowing that his discoveries would eventually be recognised as one of the foundations of modern biology. He died in 1884.