Commemoration of the publication of Gregor Mendel's pioneer experiments in genetics / Papers read at the Annual General Meeting, April 23, 1965.

  • American Philosophical Society
Date:
1965
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Commemoration of the publication of Gregor Mendel's pioneer experiments in genetics / Papers read at the Annual General Meeting, April 23, 1965. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    VOL. 109, NO. 4, 1965] MENDEL, HIS WORK AND PLACE IN HISTORY 193 the monastery he resisted the Austrian govern¬ ment in its efforts to tax the properties of re¬ ligious foundations. His refusal to pay caused distraints and sequestrations of monastery prop¬ erties which he believed had been entrusted to his care. As a man of conscience he took his liberal political views seriously and maintained his defiance of the government decree until his death. Thus in both his scientific and administrative work he was convinced of the rightness of his views even when these were not accepted by others. The external events of his life which reveal this attitude are matters of record ; but we have little record of what he thought. One result of our ignorance of Mendel's personal life is that there is little to deflect our attention from the record on which his reputation rests. We have to know him from his own writings. He published only four papers—one in 1854 when he was thirty-two years old, on the damage caused in Brünn by the pea beetle Bruchus pisi. This tells us that he had become interested in breeding peas. Ten years later came his major paper of 1865 (published 1866) ^ followed by one minor report in 1869 (published 1870) on the failure of his breeding experiments with the hawkweed Hieracium to confirm his results with peas. This may well have been responsible for his renunciation of experimental work. At any rate he published nothing further on plant breeding. His last brief paper (presented 1870, published 1871) was the outcome of a long¬ standing interest in meteorology. It described a tornado which devastated Brünn, October 13, 1870. What was characteristic of Mendel was that the sharp and clear description was accom¬ panied by a new interpretation of the cause of tornadoes as vortices engendered by encounters between conflicting air currents. This paper too seems to have been overlooked by those who many years later developed a similar explanation of the origin of tornadoes. To these four brief papers we must add the ten letters to Nägeli. This was indeed a modest bibliography for a modern scientist, representing some fifteen years of active devotion to experimental work. But his writings are quite sufficient to reveal a mind Gregor Mendel, Über einige aus Künstlicher Be¬ fruchtung gewonnene Hieracium Bastarde, Verh. natur¬ forsch. Verein. Brünn 8 (1870) : pp. 26-31. Gregor Mendel, Die Windhose vom 13 October 1870, Verh. naturforsch. Verein. Brünn 14 (1871). of genuine originality and simplicity, one which picked out the main point and explored it with directness and efficiency. In fact only his chief paper is needed to demonstrate these qualities. I venture to say that in clarity and incisiveness this paper has never been surpassed by those which succeeded it as genetics grew. In judging Mendel's place in history we have to consider first whether he supplied something which was unique. Such a question can properly apply of course only to his own period, for as the history of discovery shows, in time nearly every major idea is rediscovered (Merton, 1961 ).^® In the middle of the nineteenth century there is no question that Mendel alone expressed a new and original idea. Its essence was that heredity operates by elements which behave ac¬ cording to definite statistical rules. The main ones were that the transmission mechanism of biological heredity consists of many pairs of al¬ ternative characters or elements of which only one member is transmitted by any one reproductive cell; and that in the formation of such cells mem¬ bers of different pairs from the parents enter into all possible combinations with each other. These rules are usually referred to as the prin¬ ciples of segregation and of independent assort¬ ment of hereditary elements or genes. The dis¬ covery of order where none had been perceived before was of great importance. For the growth of biological ideas, however, the manner of proof was of even greater importance. The rules were demonstrated by simple experiments which anyone could perform. Mendel's paper was throughout an application of inductive reasoning radically applied at a time when general views of biological processes were often reached by deductive proc¬ esses. Mendel's method of experimental breed¬ ing, in which all plants were individually identified and all offspring of deliberately made crosses were classified for each pair of contrasted charac¬ ters and counted, was simple, but it was original and at that time unique. Moreover the experi¬ ments were deliberately designed to test a theory— and this kind of experimental design was new in biology. One may say that in fact Mendel differed from all his predecessors and contemporaries chiefly in this ; that he was looking for a law of a specific kind and designed his experiments to Robert K. Merton, Singletons and Multiples in Sci¬ entific Discovery : A Chapter in the Sociology of Sci¬ ence, Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc. 105 (1961) : pp. 470-486.