Short essay on the Early concept of heredity

For many years philosophers and scientists attempted to understand and explain the science of heredity. Many ideas and views were put forward from time to time. Greek philosophers suggested that “elements” from all the body parts of both the parents passed directly to the offspring.

Hippocratus called these reproductive materials as “Gonos”-meaning seeds. Charles Darwin, 1868 proposed that all body parts of parents excrete microscopic granules or “gemmules” which pass directly to the offsprings. All these views support that the characters of the parents got mixed or amalgamated in the offspring’s.

In 1760, Koelreuter, a German botanist carried out breeding experiment in two varieties of tobacco plants and concluded that characters never got amalgamated in the offspring’s. In 1790, T.A.Knight crossed two varieties of common garden pea (Pisum sativum) plants and concluded that some characters appeared in more numbers than others in the offspring’s. John Goss, 1822, crossed two varieties of garden pea plants and concluded that the parental characters again appeared when the hybrids were self pollinated.

These experimental results proved that, the earlier concept of mixing of parental characters in the offsprings was wrong.

The findings were further corroborated by Naudin in 1862. He concluded from his breeding experiments in garden pea that on repeated crossings of hybrids, the parental types appeared in the offsprings showing that the hybrids contained the parental characters without mixing or amalgamation, though they were not externally visible

The first scientific study to understand the principle of heredity was carried out by an Austrian monk Gregor Johann Mendel in garden pea plants.

Though many workers had earlier conducted breeding experiments in pea plants they could not arrive at any conclusion. Where others failed, Mendel succeeded as he planned and conducted his experiments in scientific manner keeping all the mathematical records of his experiment and analyzing those statistically.

For his pioneering works in this field, he is known as the father of genetics. Born to a peasant family in 1822; Mendel, was edueated in a monastery and went for higher studies in scienee and mathematics to the University of Vienna. After his return from the University he joined the monastery of Brunn as a monk and spent the rest of his life there eventually becoming an abbot there. In the garden of the monastery Mendel started his breeding experiments on pea plants in 1856 and continued the experiments for eight years.

He submitted his findings to the Natural Society of Brunn in 1865 in a paper titled “Experiments in Plant Hybridisation” which was Published in the Proceedings of the society in 1866. His findings were not accepted by the then scientific communities and Mendel died in 1884 perhaps considering himself as a failure. During his life time Mendel did not receive the recognition for his work which he deserved.

His works were rediscovered in 1900 when three workers independently established Mendelism. They were a Dutch, Hugo de Vrics, a German- Carl Correns, an Austrian, and Erich Von Tschermark. After that Mendel’s observations were divided into a fundamental generalization, and two laws of inheritance.