A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [197]
Before embarking on his experiments, Mendel spent two years preparing his control specimens, seven varieties of pea, to make sure they bred true. Then, helped by two full-time assistants, he repeatedly bred and crossbred hybrids from thirty thousand pea plants. It was delicate work, requiring them to take the most exacting pains to avoid accidental cross-fertilization and to note every slight variation in the growth and appearance of seeds, pods, leaves, stems, and flowers. Mendel knew what he was doing.
He never used the word gene—it wasn't coined until 1913, in an English medical dictionary—though he did invent the terms dominant and recessive. What he established was that every seed contained two “factors” or “elemente,” as he called them—a dominant one and a recessive one—and these factors, when combined, produced predictable patterns of inheritance.
The results he converted into precise mathematical formulae. Altogether Mendel spent eight years on the experiments, then confirmed his results with similar experiments on flowers, corn, and other plants. If anything, Mendel was too scientific in his approach, for when he presented his findings at the February and March meetings of the Natural History Society of Brno in 1865, the audience of about forty listened politely but was conspicuously unmoved, even though the breeding of plants was a matter of great practical interest to many of the members.
When Mendel's report was published, he eagerly sent a copy to the great Swiss botanist Karl-Wilhelm von Nägeli, whose support was more or less vital for the theory's prospects. Unfortunately, Nägeli failed to perceive the importance of what Mendel had found. He suggested that Mendel try breeding hawkweed. Mendel obediently did as Nägeli suggested, but quickly realized that hawkweed had none of the requisite features for studying heritability. It was evident to him that Nägeli had not read the paper closely, or possibly at all. Frustrated, Mendel retired from investigating heritability and spent the rest of his life growing outstanding vegetables and studying bees, mice, and sunspots, among much else. Eventually he was made abbot.
Mendel's findings weren't quite as widely ignored as is sometimes suggested. His study received a glowing entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica—then a more leading record of scientific thought than now—and was cited repeatedly in an important paper by the German Wilhelm Olbers Focke. Indeed, it was because Mendel's ideas never entirely sank below the waterline of scientific thought that they were so easily recovered when the world was ready for them.
Together, without realizing it, Darwin and Mendel laid the groundwork for all of life sciences in the twentieth century. Darwin saw that all living things are connected, that ultimately they “trace their ancestry to a single, common source,” while Mendel's work provided the mechanism to explain how that could happen. The two men could easily have helped each other. Mendel owned a German edition of the Origin of Species, which he is known to have read, so he must have realized the applicability of his work to Darwin's, yet he appears to have made no effort to get in touch. And Darwin for his part is known to have studied Focke's influential paper with its repeated references to Mendel's work, but didn't connect them to his own studies.
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