Mendel Gregor born July 22, 1892 Heingendorf Austria died Jan. 6, 1884. Brunn Austria Hungary (now Brno, Cyzech republic original name until 1843). Johan Mendal Austrian botanist and plant experimenter, the first to lay the mathematical foundation of the science of genetics, in what came to the called mendelism.
Mendel crossed varieties of the garden pea that had maintained under his observation, constant differences in such single alternative characters as tallness and dwarfishness, presence or absence of colour in the blossoms and axils of the leaves, and similar alternative differences in seed colour, seed shape, position of the flowers on the stem and form of the ponds. He theorized that the occurrence of the visible alternative characters of the plant, in the constant varieties and in their descendant is due to the occurrence of paired elementary units of heredity, now known as genes. The novel features of Mendel's interpretation of his data, amply confirmed by subsequent observations on other organisms including man is that these units obey simple statistical laws. The principle of those laws is that in the reproductive cells of the hybrids, half transmit one parental unit and the other half transmit the other. This separation of alternative characters in the reproductive cells, now known as Mendel's first law or the principle of segregation, adequately accounts for the results when single pairs of alternative characters are observed through? Several generations and serve reliably as a basis of predication. Mendel showed, moreover, that when several pairs of alternative characters are observed the several pairs of elements enter into all possible combinations in the progeny. In pea varieties at his disposal he observed that the seven pairs differentiating characters recombined at random, according to the law or principle of independent assortment, and he worked out the statistical consequences of this principle and confirmed them by experiment.[102]