One day in cellular biology, I sat next to a guy named Eric, a bearded ex-marine who speaks fluent Chinese. He had a drawing of what looked like a super hero in drag sporting red high heels on the cover of his notebook. “Who is that?” I asked. “Iron Man relaxing at home” he said. Later, when we were delving into Mendelian genetics, I asked if he knew the difference between co-dominance and incomplete dominance. “I do in a relationship,” he said.
Both my human genetics and cellular biology classes are done for the quarter. I have 10 class-free days ahead of me that I plan to spend in an orgy of reading (which will probably devolve into binge-watching Homeland and The Americans) before I start a molecular biology class at the UW and a cone-of-shame math class at Seattle Central. I’m required to take it, something I should have done in high school, before I’m eligible to begin my year of inorganic chemistry.
The human genetics class didn’t even seem like work because it was so weird and engaging. I love the story of the founding father of modern genetics, Gregor Mendel. He was a 19th century Augustinian friar at a monastery in Brno (in what is now the Czech Republic) who figured out how traits are passed from parents to offspring. He failed the exam to become a teacher, not once, but twice, before resigning himself to working as a substitute teacher. He wasn’t recognized for his discoveries in his lifetime, which sounds so sad to me, like Vincent van Gogh not being celebrated for his marvelous work while he was alive. But unlike van Gogh, Mendel appears to have led a quiet, industrious life, and died a natural death.
Mendel deduced the laws of genetic inheritance—that genes come in pairs and that one is inherited from the mother, the other from the father, from his work with pea plants. At the time of his experiments, people thought that traits where the result of blending or through acquired characteristics. For example, mate a black cow with a white cow and you will get a grey cow, or that giraffes have long necks because of stretching to reach the tops of trees for leaves.
Though genes weren’t called genes until the early 20th century, Mendel knew that little particles, or discrete, inheritable units, existed and that they were passed down from generation to generation. He called it particulate inheritance; it was a revolutionary idea, and the few people that heard about his conclusions thought he was nuts.
Beginning in the mid-1850s, Mendel meticulously fertilized thousands and thousands of pea plants by hand using paintbrush and monumental patience to see which traits persisted, disappeared, and re-appeared. He looked at seven different traits of pea plants, like color of flower, length of stem, and color of seed. By crossing tall plants with short ones, wrinkly seeded plants with smooth ones, he could describe dominant and recessive traits in statistical terms of consistent ratios and proportions.
The work must have been fairly tedious, but I picture him contentedly puttering around his flowers humming quietly under his breath. Below is a photo of Mendel next to a drawing of his beloved pea plant, Pisum sativum. I like his glasses, very minimalist-chic.
Mendel presented his finding in 1865, but no one appeared to be listening. He stuffed his paper with lots of statistics, which was unusual for the time, and eyes probably glazed over. For years, Mendel wrote about his experiments to Carl Nägeli, a respected plant physiologist in Munich. The significance of Mendel’s findings escaped Nägeli, whom I think of uncharitably as Shit-for-Brains, and Nägeli did not encourage Mendel in his research.
Eventually Mendel was promoted to abbot in the Brno Monastery and abandoned his scientific work. It wasn’t until 1900 that his work was rediscovered – sixteen years after his death. Mendel said:
My scientific studies have afforded me great gratification; and I am convinced that it will not be long before the whole world acknowledges the result of my work.
Mendel’s careful work in a small garden transformed our understanding of the world and laid the foundation for the science of modern genetics.
Successive Approximation 
Recently read the Violinist’s Thumb and was repeatedly surprised how often “no one appeared to be listen” to these hard working scientists. Possibly we should hand out megaphones to graduates with a masters of science.
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Was thinking that this post made me want to pick up a biography and read it, and I see April has also suggested a good read. . guess it’s time to go shopping. Thanks for another interesting post EB.
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