49 Fun Facts About Gregor Mendel

Mendel was abbot of St Thomas' Abbey in which city?

Brno: then called Brünn, its abbey was less a cloister than a college, a dozen or so scholar-friars whose main public duty was to supply teachers for the region's schools.

Which duty of a parish priest upset the young Mendel so badly that his abbot made him a teacher instead?

Visiting the sick: his abbot told the bishop that Mendel was seized by an unconquerable timidity at a sick-bed and had fallen dangerously ill himself, so he was sent to a school instead.

Born Johann, Mendel took the name Gregor on joining which religious order?

The Augustinians: his physics professor, asked to pick a student for the monastery, recommended him as a young man of solid character and almost the best in his subject.

Which animals, the abbey's main source of income, had made breeding a hot topic in Mendel's homeland?

Sheep: local breeders had formed a society decades earlier to improve their wool, and Mendel's own abbot, a member, was already asking what exactly is inherited, and how.

Mendel built his laws by tracking how many contrasting traits of the pea plant?

Seven: he spent two years testing thirty-four varieties first, and kept only traits that came in two clear-cut forms, such as tall or short, so that every plant could be scored without doubt.

When Mendel crossed pure-breeding yellow peas with green ones, what colour were the seeds of the offspring?

All yellow: green had not been lost, only hidden, for it turned up again when these plants were bred with one another.

In the second generation of Mendel's crosses, the two seed colours appeared in what ratio?

3 to 1: the hidden colour came back in a quarter of the seeds, and so steady a proportion told Mendel that each parent hands on one of two separate factors at random.

What do geneticists now call the alternative versions of a hereditary factor, such as Mendel's yellow and green?

Alleles: every plant carries two for each trait, one from each parent, which is how a character can vanish for a generation and then return.

In which language, his mother tongue, did Mendel write his famous paper on pea hybrids?

German: he read it to his local natural history society in 1865, and neither that audience nor the journal's readers grasped what he had found.

Mendel's paper lay neglected for roughly how long?

35 years, near enough: published in 1866, it was barely cited until 1900, when three botanists in three countries reported the same laws within two months and each acknowledged that he had got there first.

Which Dutch botanist was among the three scientists who rediscovered Mendel's laws?

Hugo de Vries: two other botanists reported the same laws within weeks of him, and each said he had learned only late in his work that an unknown monk had got there first.

As a boy on the family farm, Mendel worked as a gardener and studied what?

Beekeeping: he never gave it up, building an apiary at the monastery to cross different races of bee, and complaining as a busy abbot that he had to neglect 'my plants and my bees'.

Struggling to pay for his studies, Mendel was helped by his younger sister Theresia, who gave him what?

Her dowry: he never forgot it, later bringing her three sons to live near him and paying for their schooling, and two of them became doctors.

By his own account, what drove Mendel into a monastery?

Money worries: he wrote that he felt compelled to enter a station in life that would free him from 'the bitter struggle for existence', and that his circumstances decided his choice of vocation.

To which university was Mendel sent for two years after failing his teaching exam in 1850?

Vienna: two years of physics and mathematics there shaped the way he later designed his pea crosses, but at his second try for the certificate he broke down under the strain and never qualified.

As abbot, Mendel took a paid post as deputy chairman of which kind of business?

A mortgage bank: the post paid well but kept him at a desk there for an hour or two almost every day, one of the many duties that slowly crowded out his experiments.

Which physicist taught Mendel at university in the early 1850s?

Christian Doppler: the man behind the Doppler effect taught him experimental physics, a discipline that Mendel carried into the monastery garden when he turned to peas.

To which part of the cell were Mendel's hereditary 'factors' traced soon after his work resurfaced?

The chromosomes: in 1902 Walter Sutton, watching grasshopper cells divide, saw them pair up and then part as sex cells form, just as Mendel's factors were supposed to.

In summer 1862 Mendel joined a luxury group tour by chartered train to which two cities?

Paris and London: the goal was London's International Exhibition, a world's fair, and the friar travelled in style with a party of well-to-do tourists on what was billed as a pleasure train.

After becoming abbot, Mendel's science largely ended because of a long government dispute over what?

Taxes on religious institutions: convinced the new levy was unlawful, he refused to pay it for ten years, even when the state seized the abbey's estates to collect.

Left alone, how do pea plants normally set seed, a habit that kept Mendel's varieties pure?

By fertilising themselves: each variety therefore bred true, and to make a cross Mendel had to fertilise every flower by hand, the most laborious part of his work.

Which Czech composer played the organ at Mendel's funeral?

Leos Janacek: he had grown up as a choirboy in the abbey's own music school, and few of the hundreds of mourners he played for knew they were burying a great scientist.

What is thought to have happened to Mendel's notes and papers soon after his death?

They were burned: only his bound books were spared, and who gave the order is no longer clear; even the handwritten manuscript of his pea paper went missing, and came home only in 2012.

In the label F1 for the first generation of a Mendelian cross, what does the F stand for?

Filial: from the Latin for son or daughter, so F1 plants are the children of the original cross and F2 the grandchildren, the generation in which hidden traits come back.

Which word, coined in 1909, describes a plant's visible traits as opposed to its hidden hereditary make-up?

Phenotype: Mendel's crosses showed why the distinction matters, since two tall plants can look identical and yet breed differently, one true, the other throwing short offspring.

Which insect became the workhorse of genetics once Thomas Hunt Morgan began breeding it, within a decade of Mendel's laws resurfacing?

Fruit fly: the matings in Morgan's 'Fly Room' at Columbia University turned the monk's abstract factors into things that could be mapped, and won him a Nobel Prize in 1933.

What set Mendel apart from earlier breeders?

Counting thousands of plants: some 28,000 over eight seasons, enough for the play of chance to even out and for a steady proportion to show through.

Which pea seeds did Mendel cross first?

Round and wrinkled: the wrinkled kind lacks a working enzyme for making starch, the first of his traits to be traced to its gene, more than a century after he described it.

Mendel's two generalisations were the Law of Segregation and the Law of what?

Independent Assortment: he found that traits such as seed colour and plant height are handed on separately, so that a cross can shuffle old characters into combinations never seen before.

In 1902 Archibald Garrod showed that Mendel's laws, worked out in peas, also govern heredity in which species?

Humans: he noticed that alkaptonuria, a rare disorder that darkens the urine, turned up most often in the children of first cousins, just as a hidden recessive trait should.

What do geneticists call the plants that Mendel simply called hybrids?

Heterozygous: such plants carry two different versions of a factor, and he showed that they pass each version to half their pollen grains and half their egg cells, which is where his ratios come from.

Which famous contemporary, working on inheritance himself, never learned of Mendel's paper?

Charles Darwin: the neglect ran one way only, for Mendel bought Darwin's books as soon as translations appeared and filled his copy of the Origin of Species with notes.

In his famous pea paper, which other garden crop did Mendel report crossing to check his laws?

Beans: one cross behaved exactly like his peas, but the flower colours of another came out in a jumble, and he guessed, rightly, that several factors were acting together.

Mendel's ratios grew out of which branch of mathematics, which he had studied at university?

Combinatorics: he saw that his 1 to 2 to 1 pattern of pure, hybrid and pure plants matches the terms of a squared binomial, and used the same reasoning to predict crosses of two and three traits.

Which theory of heredity, common in Mendel's day, did his pea crosses contradict?

Blending inheritance: the idea that offspring average out their parents' traits, which meant any useful new trait should be diluted away within a few generations, a puzzle that Mendel's unmixing factors removed.

Who coined the word 'genetics' and did most to publicise Mendel's theory in its early days?

William Bateson: nicknamed 'Mendel's bulldog', he led the long fight against the statisticians Pearson and Weldon, who would not accept the monk's laws.

Which statistician argued in 1936 that Mendel's results matched his theory too closely to be true?

Ronald Fisher: he called the figures too good to be true, but later scholars argue that he misread the experiments and that the charge of falsification does not stand.

Which two flower colours did Mendel follow through the generations in his pea crosses?

Purple and white: the white form has a fault in a single gene needed to make pigment, identified in 2010, which is why Mendel always found white flowers on plants with pale seed coats.

Besides peas, Mendel published a study of which other genus, whose results baffled him?

Hawkweed: its hybrids did, in his words, exactly the opposite of his peas, varying at first and then breeding true, which left him unsure how far his laws applied.

Why, as botanists later realised, did Mendel's second study plant refuse to follow his pea laws?

It sets seed without sex: most of its seeds are copies of the mother plant, formed with no pollen at all, so many of his painstaking crosses had never really taken place.

Which diagram, named after a British geneticist, is used to predict the offspring of a Mendelian cross?

Punnett square: Reginald Punnett, an early champion of the monk's laws at Cambridge, drew it up around 1905 to show at a glance how two parents' factors can pair off.

Which notation, still used in every biology class, did Mendel use for the two forms of a trait?

Capital and small letters: he wrote A for the form that shows in a hybrid and a for the one that hides, so that a cross could be set out and checked like a piece of algebra.

On which subject, rather than heredity, did Mendel publish most of his scientific papers?

The weather: he logged readings at the monastery for nearly three decades, and wrote a careful study of the tornado that tore through his town in 1870.

Under which Soviet doctrine was Mendelian genetics rejected and geneticists imprisoned or executed?

Lysenkoism: Stalin backed the agronomist Trofim Lysenko, the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov died in prison, and in Mendel's own town his statue was moved out of sight until the 1960s.

The Czech polar station named after Mendel stands where?

Antarctica: the base on James Ross Island is run by the university in the city where he lived and worked, and it earns the Czech Republic a vote in the treaty system that governs the continent.

Why did Mendel move some of his potted pea plants into a greenhouse while they flowered?

To keep insects away: the sheltered plants were his control against stray pollen carried in by beetles, and under glass he never once found a wrongly fertilised seed.

The 1930s-40s union of Mendelian genetics with natural selection is known as what?

The modern synthesis: the name comes from Julian Huxley's 1942 book, and it ended decades in which Mendel's followers and the champions of natural selection had treated the two theories as rivals.

Mendel's monastery stood in the capital of which historic land, now the eastern Czech Republic?

Moravia: as abbot he was drawn onto its committees for everything from farm subsidies to country roads, and those duties, more than any loss of interest, ended his experiments.

Rediscoverer Carl Correns had what link to Carl Nägeli, who never grasped Mendel's pea results?

His student: Correns even married the professor's niece, and in 1905 it was he who brought Mendel's long correspondence with Nägeli into print.