The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics by Robin Marantz Henig. Houghton Mifflin, $24, 291 pages.

The Chapel Hill News

April 27, 2003

The Monk in the Garden

By Phillip Manning

Jim Watson and Francis Crick are celebrating the 50th anniversary of their discovery of the structure of DNA. Their breakthrough enabled scientists to develop technologies that have profoundly changed the way we live. Today, we eat genetically modified foods; policemen and attorneys routinely use DNA "fingerprinting" to identify the guilty or exonerate the innocent; and scientists now know the composition of genes that cause inherited diseases. Watson and Crick have won numerous honors for their work, including a 1962 Nobel prize, and the accolades are deserved. But some people are not as lucky, and the man who started the genetics revolution gained neither fame nor fortune during his lifetime. So, as Crick and Watson bask in their deserved status as celebrity scientists, it is appropriate to pay belated homage to Gregor Mendel.

In her eminently readable biography "The Monk in the Garden" (Houghton Mifflin, $24), Robin Henig traces the life of the star-crossed founder of genetics. Mendel was born in 1822 into a family of poor farmers in a tiny village in what is now the Czech Republic. Mendel loved school but hated farming, occasionally taking to his bed for months at a time, perhaps to hide from a life he could not tolerate. His bewildered parents withdrew all financial support for his schooling. He took the only path available to a penniless, ambitious boy who hungered for education; he signed on with the monks.

Mendel moved to the Austrian city of Brunn and joined the monastery of St. Thomas, which was run by Augustinians whose credo was "from knowledge to wisdom." The Augustinians preferred teaching and research to prayer, which suited the young Mendel perfectly. In the monastery he studied botany, meteorology, physics, and mathematics, as well as theological subjects. "Monastery life was a balm to Mendel," writes Henig. "Its regularity provided ease and comfort to a man who had spent his first twenty-one years in a thicket of uncertainty." The abbot also granted Mendel access to the monastery's greenhouse.

He fell into a routine of studying, teaching, and gardening. We don't know exactly what Mendel set out to accomplish when he began his work on plant hybridization, but we do know that he chose pea plants for his experiments because they had easily identifiable traits. Mendel identified seven of these traits whose aspects never seemed to blend. One trait, for instance, was the color of the peas; they were either green or yellow, never chartreuse. Another was the height of the plant; they were either tall or short, never medium sized. And because every pea-plant flower contained both the male and female reproductive organs, crossbreeding never occurred naturally.

After proving that the peas bred true, Mendel began to crossbreed them. He ran seven experiments, crossing the two aspects of each of the seven traits. The hybrid seeds were then planted and allowed to self-fertilize for five more generations. For every trait, the results were the same, a 3:1 ratio of one aspect to another. The first generation of his yellow- and green-pea hybrids, for example, produced three yellows for every green. As he analyzed later generations, he realized that yellow peas carried a dominant "factor" while green peas had a recessive factor. To produce a yellow pea, he needed only one yellow factor from either parent. But to make a green pea, both parents had to carry the green factor. These factors, which we call genes today, are handed down from generation to generation.

Mendel revealed the results of his years of meticulous experiments at two meetings of the Brunn Society in 1865. Now 42 years old, overweight, and unaccustomed to public speaking, Mendel did not impress his audience, and many of those present lost interest in his talk because they could not follow the thread of his ideas. He was devastated by the poor reception but got a second chance for public recognition when the society published his paper. Mendel sent 40 reprints to scientists he respected. Except for one quarrelsome botanist, he got no response. One copy went to Charles Darwin, who could have used Mendel's results to explain the genetics behind his theory of evolution. The reprint was found later in Darwin's library with the pages uncut; he never bothered to read it. And like a stone falling into the ocean, Mendel's years of work simply vanished.

Mendel's research was cut short a year after he mailed his reprints when he was made abbot of St. Thomas monastery. He spent his time attending to the duties of that position until he died in 1884 at age 63. His work was rediscovered in 1900, and he began to receive posthumously the accolades he so richly deserved and so desperately wanted. Today, he is celebrated as the father of modern genetics, and even Jim Watson, who does not sling compliments lightly, wrote that "Gregor Mendel was the one who got it right."
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