H. J. Mendel was (and still is) one of the greatest Czech scientist. He started preparing his research in 1854. He defined his thesis, made first experiments and collected seeds of up to 40 varieties of pea plants, checking constancy of their traits. Experiments began in 1856 and took nine years of persistent work. Mendel then published three generalizations based on the experiments which later became famous as Mendel's Laws of Inheritance. Mendel presented conclusions from his experiments in his paper at the meeting of the Natural History Society in 1865 and published the study as Experiments on Plant Hybridization (VersucheüberPflanzen-Hybriden) in 1866 which did not get much attention.
Gregor Johann Mendel died on Jan. 6, 1884 without being recognized for his painstaking work. Great significance of his findings and recognition of his discoveries became appreciated only in the 20th century when a group of scientists re-discovered what Mendel precisely defined and described in the late 1800s. These findings have been applied in plant and animal breeding as well as medicine and other fields. Modern genetics is the basis of current experiments in cell reproduction and cloning, and is a truly prestigious and celebrated science.
Before Mendel’s discoveries inbred features were considered a blend similar to the blending of black and white producing a shade of grey. Mendel proved that inbred features are distributed in organized factors (Mendel’s words for genetic information). The factors described the combinations and explained the scheme which became the foundation of genetics, and helped define the principles now globally referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance.
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