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If Darwin is not a professional scientist and does not have any university or scientific research background, his scientific achievements are supported by his travel experience, data collection, and then his father's legacy. it was only later that he was qualified as a member of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom.

Compared with Darwin, Greg Mendel is a complete amateur. As a high school teacher, he did not pass the qualification exam; as a priest in a seminary, he studied biology in his spare time, and his chosen research direction ran counter to Darwin's. These factors are destined to make him lonely and frustrated.

If he could have a title or give himself a title, perhaps after receiving his letter, Darwin would open it and read it, and the situation might be completely different. Unfortunately, he missed this opportunity, too. Mendel's achievements have not been recognized in any way. He is not a member of any academic community, but his achievements have opened up a new field of biology-genetics, and laid another important foundation for the development of biology. The name Greg Mendel is often mentioned in contemporary genetic research, and he is recognized as the father of modern genetics.

Greg Mendel was in the monastery. Mendel found a piece of land that could be cultivated freely and began the experiment of pea hybridization. He creatively adopted a strict screening method and selected 22 out of 33 different strains of pea.

A total of 29,000 peas were planted in the eight years from 1856 to 1863. He painstakingly recorded the subtle differences in the growth of pea seeds, pods, leaves, stems and flowers. After careful screening, he identified 12,835 plants and found some interesting phenomena. When a pea plant with yellow seeds is crossed with a pea plant with green seeds, their offspring are always yellow, but in the next generation, the rate of green reproduction is 1:3. He also noticed that the shape of pea seeds, there are triangular and round, pea plant flowering, flower position, pod shape and color are different, through hybridization, there is a similar pattern in the above-mentioned properties.

In order to explain this discovery, Mendel introduced two important concepts, namely, "recessive factor" and "dominant factor". According to his statistics, the probability of having "pure recessive" performance is 1/4, 2/4 is "mixed", and the other 1/4 is "pure dominance". After nearly 10 years of experiments, Mendel has obtained two conclusions, which have become two important laws of genetics, namely, the law of separation and the law of free combination, which are later called Mendelian laws of genetics.

On March 8, 1865, Mendel read out his research results at the Brno Natural Science Society. The following year, Mendel's paper "Plant Hybridization experiment" was published in the Proceedings of the Brno Botanical Society. He raised money to print 12 booklets and 40 samples, which were sent to major libraries around the world and sent to some internationally renowned scholars. His research results were included in the Encyclopedia Britannica. At that time, this encyclopedia was a record of scientific ideas and had a high academic status. This opportunity preserves Mendel's brilliant idea, and when the time is ripe, it will be easily rediscovered. At that time, Mendel opened up a new field of biological research-genetics will blossom everywhere.

However, at that time, because of the lack of conditions for acceptance, Mendel's thought was generally snubbed by the academic circles. Among the people who received Mendel's booklet, only Carl William Negri, a famous botanist at the University of Munich, replied to him, and many more did not even open the email. Mendel wrote back to Negri and told Negri all about his work. Unfortunately, in his second reply on February 25, 1867, Negri arrogantly criticized him, saying that his experiment was "far from finished. It's just the beginning." And mistakenly suggested that Mendel should experiment with mountain willow chrysanthemum.

Mountain willow chrysanthemum is parthenogenetic and can not complete the hybridization between father and mother at all. naturally, the experimental results are not consistent with Mendel's previous experiments, and this misjudgment has become an excuse for his opposition to Mendel. Negri made no mention of Mendel's work in most of his works published after 1884. Schmalhausen of Russia correctly expounded Mendel's creative discovery in his works, but this important paragraph was deleted from the German translation of the book. O.Hofmann also mentioned Mendel's findings many times in his monographs, but they are all details of Mendel's research results.

Mendel's cold reception was caused by a variety of factors. First of all, he found his own way under the aura of Darwin's success. At that time, the theory of evolution was dominant, and although Darwin's "Origin of species" encountered all kinds of resistance when it was first published in 1859, "the theory of biological evolution" quickly became the subject of biological research. At that time, biologists paid more attention to the "evolutionary factors" in biological changes than to the "genetic factors" that kept the species stable. Mendel's unique concept and special thinking of "genetic factors" made him dissociate from the academic mainstream at that time.

In addition, Mendel's research method is unique. The generation of biological researchers represented by Darwin relied on observation and qualitative research, while Mendel founded a quantitative analysis based on systematic experiments, mathematical models, mathematical statistics and logical reasoning. This set of scientific methods were far above the level of Darwin and biological research at that time, which made senior people in the industry feel uncomfortable at that time.

In Mendel's rejection, the academic ecological environment is also a big factor. The "family view" of paying attention to "qualification" and "authority" formed a barrier, which made "amateur science" lack a foothold and voice place in the ecological environment at that time. Under the above factors, Darwin and others, after receiving the booklet sent by Mendel, only looked at the catalogue and put it aside without even opening the pages of the text.

The man who changed the fate of mankind himself was ill-fated. He was a monk at Brno Monastery. Apart from working as a part-time teacher in a middle school in the name of charity, his only job was to do plant hybrid experiments, which he regarded as the fruits of life that were ignored by most people at that time.

When Mendel died, his good friend published an obituary in the Brno Daily that day: "his death deprived the poor of a donor, a noble man, an enthusiastic promoter of natural science, and an exemplary priest." People simply don't realize that this is a man who has rewritten history.

It was not until 1900, 16 years after Mendel's death, that several scientists discovered Mendel's law, 34 years after Mendel published his law of genetics. The scientists are DeVries of the Netherlands, Collins of Germany, Mark of Austria and Spelman. They independently confirmed Mendel's genetic achievements using the techniques of modern genetics.

In 1933, Collins, a geneticist and botanist, said: "I thought we had found something new, but then it suddenly dawned on Greg Mendel as early as 60 years ago." his experiments are not only exactly the same as the experiments that DeVries and I have done over the years, but also the same explanation as early as 1866. "

Mendel's chosen path of life is doomed to have no utilitarian return, on the contrary, he has a lot to lose. In order to do this, he needs to choose a large sample of continuous hybridization experiments, and he does everything he can. He twice participated in the teacher qualification examination, both of which were denied by the examiners because of the lack of formal scientific training. He was elected abbot of the monastery, but his opposition to the government's tax policy caused him to hit a brick wall politically. He is not untalented, but because of the path he has chosen, he has "degraded other functions".

In the experiment, he has always been meticulous, has tried more than 30 peas, seven years of experiments, pollination hundreds of times, recorded thousands of times. Hard work in exchange for a very critical result, but there is no way to report. What underpins all this is faith. He once said: "I do scientific research, which gives me great satisfaction." I firmly believe that in the near future, the world will realize the value of this achievement. "

Mendel's portrait of Mendel lived a lonely life in his later years. On January 6, 1884, he died of nephritis at the age of 61. When he was dying, he breathed a sigh of breath when he found that the chromosomes of bisexual cells had halved when they matured, because his law of heredity had finally been strongly proved. He said to his friend, "look, my time has come!"

Mendel was right, and the time he had been looking forward to had come. After completing 29,000 boring cross breeding experiments, discovering the important laws that govern genetics, publishing his results, and being ignored for 35 years, the world finally realized the value of his achievements.

In 1950, the combination of genetics and biochemistry gave birth to molecular biology, followed by the birth of DNA technology, which promoted the emergence of life science, human genetics, genomics, bioinformatics and other disciplines. These brilliant achievements are driven by the basic discipline of genetics, which has brought about the development of the biotechnology industry, triggered a green revolution, and ushered in a new era of biomedical science. all these originated from Mendel's genius experiments and theoretical innovations.

Source: 365 days in the History of Science, slightly edited by: Wei Fengwen Wu Yi Editor: Zhang Runxin this article comes from the official account of Wechat: Origin Reading (ID:tupydread), author: Wei Fengwen, Wu Yi, Editor: Zhang Runxin

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