Peas and Primroses

Remember the monk and the peas? The story introduced school children to genetics long before the human genome made the evening news. The Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel conducted hundreds of experiments on the edible pea, crossing peas that were smooth or wrinkled, peas that grew tall or short, peas that had white or violet flowers. He found that the results of these crosses were predictable, and in 1865 he presented his findings to the Brunn Society for the Study of Natural Science in Moravia (1). But there was little reaction to Mendel’s report, and his next experiments took a different turn. Mendel sent his report to a famous botanist in Munich, Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli. The botanist replied, but his letter encouraged Mendel to examine the hawkweeds, a group of plants related to asters. In 1866, no one recognized that hawkweeds reproduced asexually and were not subject to Mendel’s meticulously developed theories of hybridization. Mendel went through years of scientific failure, all the while continuing his hawkweed correspondence with Nägeli. By 1873 Mendel gave up his experiments and became abbot of the monastery. He died in 1884 without ever seeing his pea experiments vindicated (1)