MENDEL: Morphologist and Mathematician Founder of Genetics - To Begin a Celebration of the 2015 Sesquicentennial of Mendel's Presentation in 1865 of his Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden.

Abstract

Entering a school building, recently erected at state expenses, to attend a regularly scheduled evening session of a local and regional scientific association, few would give any thought to its foundation. Except perhaps those who watched the building go up in the downtown area of Brunn (Brno) in 1858/9 and who taught in it, as did Mendel (Fig.​(Fig.1).1). Thus, 150 years ago, on a cold clear (Iltis 1924) February night (2/8/1865) a small group of Augustinian monks, all priests, Mendel among them, made their way from their more or less permanent abode, the renowned, ancient abbey of St. Thomas, along the Johannesgasse to the new school building to hear Fr. Mendel present the results of his 8 years of research into plant hybrids, specifically crosses of several types of Pisum sativum, garden peas. The monastery with its beautiful Gothic church (Fig.​(Fig.2)2) was located in Altbrunn (Stare Brno), incorporated into Brunn, then as now the capital of Moravia. At the time, Moravia was in the Austrian Empire in that portion of Silesia left to Austria after the three wars between Frederic the Great and Empress Maria Theresia. Later it was in Czechoslovakia, and at present is in the Czech Republic. Figure 1 Pencil and ink sketch of Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) as imagined at the time he gave his lecture on February 8, 1865. Used with permission by the artist Claire Harper and provided by Dr. Sherri Bale, GeneDx. Figure 2 Partial view of the Koniginkloster (“Queen's Cloister”), Abbey of St. Thomas of Altbrunn taken by Diana Bianchi in 2003. View from southwest. On the left, between two trees is the Charlemont monument to Mendel. The part ... Entering the Oberrealschule, the monks and their secular fellow members and guests of the Society of Natural Sciences (Naturforschender Verein) left their top hats, canes, and capes in the lobby, took their seats close to the stove, noting the officers of the Association moving forward to where Mendel had seated himself in the front row. The Vice President of the Association, the distinguished botanist Carl (or Karl) Theimer, announced the evening's agenda and asked the Association's equally accomplished secretary, the botanist and astronomer Gustav V. Niessl to introduce the speaker, Mendel, and invited him to give the first of his two presentations on Experiments in Plant Hybridization (Versuche uber Pflanzenhybriden). The second, Mendel's summary and conclusion, was given 1 month later (3/8/1865). Thus, more or less imaginatively retold, occurred an event, surely equal in importance in the history of Western Biology to the presentation just 7 years earlier by Darwin's friends and colleagues to the Linnean Society of London (Slotten 2004) on the theory of descent with modification through the action of natural selection proposed by Wallace and Darwin.