Gregor Mendel was born in the district of Moravia, Essays - Biology

Gregor Mendel was born in the district of Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the end of high school, he entered the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas in the city of Brnn, now Brno of the Czech Republic. His monastery was dedicated to teaching science and to scientific research, so Mendel was sent to a university in Vienna to obtain his teaching credentials. However, he failed his examinations and returned to the monastery at Brnn. There he embarked on the research program of plant hybridization that was posthumously to earn him the title of founder of the science of genetics. Mendel's studies constitute an outstanding example of good scientific technique. He chose research material well suited to the study of the problem at hand, designed his experiments carefully, collected large amounts of data, and used mathematical analysis to show that the results were consistent with his explanatory hypothesis. The predictions of the hypothesis were then tested in a new round of experimentation. Mendel studied the garden pea (Pisum sativum) for two main reasons. First, peas were available from seed merchants in a wide array of distinct shapes and colors that could be easily identified and analyzed. Second, peas can either self (self-pollinate) or be cross-pollinated. The peas self because the male parts (anthers) and female parts (ovaries) of the flowerwhich produce the pollen containing the sperm and the ovules containing eggs, respectivelyare enclosed by two petals fused to form a compartment called a keel. The gardener or experimenter can cross (cross-pollinate) any two pea plants at will. The anthers from one plant are removed before they have opened to shed their pollen, an operation called emasculation that is done to prevent selfing. Pollen from the other plant is then transferred to the receptive stigma with a paintbrush or on anthers themselves. Thus, the experimenter can choose to self or to cross the pea plants. Other practical reasons for Mendel's choice of peas were that they are inexpensive and easy to obtain, take up little space, have a short generation time, and produce many offspring. Such considerations enter into the choice of organism for any piece of genetic research. Mendel chose seven different characters to study. The word character in this regard means a specific property of an organism; geneticists use this term as a synonym for characteristic or trait. For each of the characters that he chose, Mendel obtained lines of plants, which he grew for two years to make sure that they were pure. A pure line is a population that breeds true for (shows no variation in) the particular character being studied; that is, all offspring produced by selfing or crossing within the population are identical for this character. By making sure that his lines bred true, Mendel had made a clever beginning: he had established a fixed baseline for his future studies so that any changes observed subsequent to deliberate manipulation in his research would be scientifically meaningful; in effect, he had set up a control experiment.