A painting showing Gregor Mendel at work in his garden, where he studied garden peas Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Gregory Radick (University of Chicago Press)
IN 1865, an Austrian monk called Gregor Mendel, working to understand hybridisation, uncovered exquisitely simple and reliable patterns of inheritance in varieties of garden pea. In 1900, the patterns he described were rediscovered and thought by some to reveal the existence of hereditary “particles” – particles that we now call genes. With this, Mendel became “the father” of genetics.
Well, of course there is more to the story, as we discover in Disputed…
