The code of life / [Ernest Borek].

  • Ernest Borek
Date:
1965
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The code of life / [Ernest Borek]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of opposing traits, but asserts itself in the second. Moreover, the dormant factor reappears in the second generation in a ratio of one to three of the dominant factor. So here for the first time the pattern of inheritance was re vealed. Characteristics of the two parents are not transmitted to the offspring haphazardly but by some directing mechanism which achieves sufficient accuracy to entitle the pattern to be called a law. One looks upon Mendel with admiration and envy. His experiments were designed with beautiful simplicity and carried out with impeccable technique. His selection of the sweet pea was no accident. He gave his reasons for the choice: Peas were available in many pure breeding varieties; the flowers were protected anatomically from the danger of intrusion of foreign pollen; and, finally, plant fanciers knew the hybrid varieties to be perfectly fertile. With the intuition of genius he chose to work with sufficiently large numbers so that statistical accuracy could emerge from them. His conclusions he drew with bold incisiveness. Our envy is directed toward his blessed status as an amateur. The amateur has vanished from the field of science. Mendel was perhaps the last of the great ones. Today a scientist must be a small-time entrepreneur whose concern with budgets, grant applications and progress reports at least equals his preoccu pation with science. And above all, today's scientist must publish rapidly to survive. Mendel was aware of the importance of his discovery. He tried to get fellow scientists interested in it and sent a copy of his findings to an outstanding Swiss botanist, Karl von Nägeli. But the latter had his own ideas on the mechanism of heredity and brushed aside the presumptuous claims of an obscure amateur. So the meticulous report on the results of Mendel's eight years of work was buried in the pages of the provincial journal where they were printed in 1866. Two years later Mendel was elected
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