Heredity, race, and society.

  • Leslie Clarence Dunn
Date:
1947
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Heredity, race, and society. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Slovakia. There a monk named Gregor Mendel worked quietly and methodically from 1857 to 1865 crossing different varieties of the garden pea and studying the differences through several generations. In 1865 he read an account of his experiments to the society of natural ists in the town of Brno (Brünn), and this was pub lished in the journal of the society in 1866. This journal did not have a wide circulation although it was sent to a number of libraries in several countries. If any scien tists read it, they paid no attention to it, for this arti cle, which contained the gist of the modern theory of heredity, lay unnoticed until 1900. Then, 16 years after Mendel's death, three other European scientists inde pendently made a similar discovery, unearthed Mendel's forgotten account, and it suddenly became known throughout the world. That was the origin of the science of genetics, which, from that sudden beginning in 1900, has progressed with great speed. The simple rules or laws of heredity, of which the fundamental ones were discovered by Mendel, are uni versal in their application to all forms of life. The fact that they were discovered through experimentation on the humble vegetable, the garden pea, was due to Mendel's deliberate choice of this plant as offering spe cial advantages for the objective he had in mind. For he knew that to solve what for centuries had been the riddle of heredity, he must study the descendants of parents which differed in clear and unmistakable characters and must observe and count large numbers of descendants. Moreover, he must know the exact par entage of every individual and this meant that all matings must be deliberately made by the experimen ter. Nothing could be left to accident. Now human marriages cannot be made at the com mand of an experimenter, at least in our kind of society; nor will men and women choose their mates because one party has blue eyes and straight hair, is taste-blind and of blood group AB, while the other has brown eyes, curly hair, is a taster and of blood group O. People marry for reasons other than these; and controlled ex-
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