Who is known as the 'Father of Genetics'?

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) was an Austrian monk and scientist who lived in the Augustinian monastery of St Thomas in Brno, now in the Czech Republic. Between 1856 and 1863, he carried out careful experiments on about 28,000 garden pea plants (Pisum sativum) in the monastery garden.

Mendel chose the pea plant because it grows quickly, has clear contrasting traits, can self-pollinate and can easily be cross-pollinated by hand. He studied seven pairs of contrasting traits, such as tall and dwarf stems, round and wrinkled seeds, yellow and green seeds, and purple and white flowers. He kept careful counts and used mathematics to analyse the results.

From his experiments, Mendel proposed the basic laws of inheritance:

• Law of Dominance: in a pair of contrasting traits, one (dominant) appears in the first generation and the other (recessive) is hidden.
• Law of Segregation (Law of Purity of Gametes): the two factors (alleles) for a trait separate during the formation of gametes, so each gamete carries only one.
• Law of Independent Assortment: factors for different traits are inherited independently of each other, as shown in his dihybrid crosses.
• In a monohybrid cross, he found the ratio of 3:1 (dominant to recessive) in the second (F2) generation, and in a dihybrid cross, the ratio of 9:3:3:1.

Mendel presented his work in 1865 and published it in 1866, but its importance was not recognised during his lifetime. In 1900, three scientists, Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns and Erich von Tschermak, independently rediscovered his work, and genetics became a new branch of science. Mendel called the units of inheritance "factors"; today they are called genes.

Why not the other options?

• ✗Charles Darwin proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection.
• ✗Hugo de Vries rediscovered Mendel's laws and proposed the mutation theory.
• ✗Thomas Hunt Morgan is called the father of experimental genetics for his work on fruit flies.