Veritas temporis filia est: Truth is the daughter of time

Abstract

In 1865, Gregor Mendel presented the lectures 'Experiments in Plant Hybridization' concerning his results from cross-breeding experiments with different types of garden pea, performed in his monastery garden in Brno. Mendel studied easily observed pairs of opposite traits, such as purple or white flower, and discovered dominant and recessive traits. He concluded that parents pass separate and distinct factors (today called genes) on to their offspring that are responsible for inherited traits. However, the scientific community did not understand that; indeed it was the beginning of what becomes genetics. The lectures published in 1866, Mendel sent to more than 30 biologists across Europe, but almost no one commented them. In the next 35 years, these papers were only three times cited. The genetics became more important at the beginning of the 20th century, when three different research groups (Hugo de Vries, Carl Erich Correns and Erich von Tschermak with their co-workers) independently re-discovered Mendel's Laws of inheritance. However, as soon as the work was rediscovered, it created controversy. The closeness of Mendel's experimental observations to those predicted by his theories has led to numerous articles and ongoing debate about whether the data could have been obtained in the published form without some falsification. There have been many plausible arguments made for and against this view by a range of eminent geneticists and statisticians. Some have gone so far, as to suggest that the theories ensued from Mendel's two laws were not even correctly formulated in his original paper. The strongest supporters of Mendel's theory became biologist William Bateson and zoologist and geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan. Morgan argued that genes are located on chromosomes and that the cells chromosomes hold the actual hereditary material, thus created what is now known as classical genetics. For his discovery concerning the role play by the chromosome in heredity, Morgan received the Nobel Prize in 1933. As the architect of genetic experimental and statistical analysis, Mendel remains the acknowledged father of genetics.