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possesses either two dominant variants or a dominant and
recessive variant will express the dominant trait. The recessive
trait will only appear if the plant possesses two recessive variants.
Mendel’s research focused on pea plants, but he believed
his laws of inheritance to be true for all living things. In 1865
he presented his work to a small audience gathered at the
Natural History Society meeting in Brno, Czech Republic
(Brünn, in German), but the audience found his ideas difficult to
understand. After Mendel finished his first presentation, another
speaker lectured on Darwin’s theory of evolution. Nobody in the
audience, perhaps not even Mendel himself, seemed to make the
connection between Mendel’s and Darwin’s research. A missed
opportunity for the science world! Mendel published his research
in the Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brünn, but
his work went mostly overlooked for decades.
Mendel went on to become the abbot of the monastery,
and to his regret, he had little time for more plant experiments.
“I feel truly unhappy that I have to neglect my plants and bees
so completely,” he wrote to a plant physiologist who he had
wanted to interest in his work. Mendel died of kidney failure
in 1884 without having been honored for his groundbreaking
laws on inheritance that are the foundation of modern genetic
theory. During Mendel’s time, neither he nor other scientists
ever identified the heritable element that contained and
transmitted genetic material. All of their findings were based on
deductive reasoning.

BIRTH OF MODERN GENETICS
The field of heredity flourished in the early twentieth century
as botanists and plant breeders worked to answer questions
about heredity. Dutch biologist Hugo de Vries (1848–1935),
German plant geneticist Carl Correns (1864–1933), and Austrian

Genomics
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