29,000 peas were planted to get the law of genetics, and the results were buried for 35 years

Darwin was not born as a professional scientist, nor did he have any background in universities or scientific research institutions, his scientific achievements were first supported by his travel experience, data collection, and then the inheritance of his parents, and then he was granted the British Membership of the Royal Society...etc. Compared with Darwin, Gregor Mendel was a complete amateur. As a middle school teacher, he failed the qualification examination; as a priest in a seminary, he studied biology in his spare time, and the research direction he chose was contrary to Darwin's. These factors doomed him to loneliness and setbacks.

If he could have any title, or if he could give himself some title, perhaps after receiving his letter, Darwin would open it and read it, and the situation in the future may be completely different. Unfortunately, he also missed this opportunity, and throughout his life, Mendel's work received no recognition. He himself is not a member of any academic group, but his achievements have opened up a new field of biology genetics and laid another important cornerstone for the development of biology. In contemporary genetic research, Gerry The name G. Mendel is often mentioned, and he is generally considered the father of modern genetics.

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 a pea. During the eight years from 1856 to 1863, 29,000 peas were planted. He tirelessly recorded the subtle differences between pea seeds, pods, leaves, stems, and flowers during the growth process.

After careful screening, he identified 12,835 of them and discovered some interesting phenomena. When pea plants with yellow seeds are crossed with pea plants with green seeds, their offspring are always yellow, but in the next generation, the ratio of green reproduction is 1:3. He also paid attention to the shape of pea seeds, ranging from triangular to round. The flowering of pea plants, the location of flowers, the shape, and color of pods, etc. are all different. Through hybridization, similar laws are also shown in the above properties.

To explain this finding, Mendel introduced two important concepts, namely recessive factors, and dominant factors. According to his statistics, the probability of pure recessive performance is 1/4, 2/4 is mixed, and the other 1/4 is pure dominant. After nearly 10 years of series of experiments, Mendel obtained two conclusions, which became two important laws of genetics, namely, the law of separation and the law of free combination. Later generations called these two laws the laws of Mendelian genetics.

On March 8, 1865, Mendel presented the results of his research at the Brno Society of Natural Sciences. In the following year, Mendel's paper Plant Hybridization Experiment was published in the Journal of the Brno Natural Society. Send to some internationally renowned scholars. His research results were included in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which at that time was a work recording scientific thoughts and had a high academic status. This opportunity has preserved Mendel's brilliant ideas, which will be easily rediscovered when the time comes. At that time, the new field of biological research that Mendel pioneered - genetics will bloom everywhere.

However, at that time, Mendel's ideas were generally coldly received by academic circles because they did not meet the conditions for acceptance. Among those who received Mendel's monograph, only the famous botanist Carl Wilhelm Negri of the University of Munich replied to him, and more people did not even open the mail. Mendel wrote back to Negri and confessed his results to Negri. Unfortunately, in another letter on February 25, 1867, Negri arrogantly accused him, saying that his experiments were far from perfect. Far from finished, it's just the beginning. And wrongly suggested that Mendel should experiment with the willow chrysanthemum.

The mountain willow chrysanthemum is parthenogenetic and reproduces, so it is impossible to complete the hybridization of the male parent and the female parent. Naturally, the experimental results cannot be consistent with Mendel's previous experiments. This misjudgment became an excuse for him to oppose Mendel. In most of his writings published after 1884, Negri makes no mention of Mendel's work. Schmalhausen of Russia correctly described Mendel's creative discovery in his treatise, but in the German translation of the book, this important paragraph was deleted. Hofmann (O. Hofmann) also mentioned Mendel's discovery many times in his monograph, but they are all the minutiae of Mendel's research results.

The cold reception Mendel encountered was due to several factors. First, he came out of nowhere under the aura of Darwin's success. At that time, it was an era dominated by evolution theory. Although Darwin's Origin of Species was first published in 1859, it also encountered various resistances, but soon, the theory of biological evolution" quickly became the subject of biological research. Biologists at that time paid more attention to the "evolutionary factors" in biological changes, rather than the genetic factors that kept species stable. Mendel's unique concept and specific thinking about "genetic factors" made him free from Outside the academic mainstream at the time.

In addition, Mendel's research methods are unique. The generation of biological researchers represented by Darwin relied on observation and qualitative research, while what Mendel found was based on systematic experiments, formulating mathematical models, using mathematical statistics to make quantitative analysis, and then drawing conclusions through logical reasoning. This set of scientific methods was far above the level of Darwin and the biological research of the time, so it made the senior people in the industry uncomfortable at the time.

The academic ecological environment was also a big factor in Mendel's rejection. The door opinion that pays attention to qualification and authority formed a barrier, which made amateur science lack a foothold and a place to speak out in the ecological environment at that time. Under the above factors, Darwin and others only looked at the table of contents after receiving the pamphlet from Mendel and put it aside without even opening the pages of the text.

The man who changed the fate of mankind himself had a lot of troubles. He was a monk in the 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 hybridization experiments. What he regarded as the fruit of life was ignored by most people at the time.

When Mendel died, his former friend published an obituary in the Brno Daily on the same day, saying,

People simply don’t realize that this is a man who rewrote history. It wasn't until 1900, 16 years after Mendel's death, that a few scientists discovered Mendel's laws, and by then, 34 years had passed since Mendel published his laws of genetics. These scientists were De Vries from the Netherlands, Collins from Germany, and Smack, and Spearman from Austria. Using the techniques of modern genetics, they independently confirmed Mendel's genetic achievements.

In 1933, geneticist and botanist Collins said,

Mendel's chosen life path was destined to have no utilitarian rewards, on the contrary, he had a lot to lose. For this cause, it is necessary to select a large sample for continuous hybridization experiments, and he does his best. He participated in the teacher qualification examination twice but was rejected by the examiner for lack of formal scientific training. He was elected abbot of the monastery, but because of opposition to the government's tax policy, he hit a political wall left and right. He is not without talent, but the path he chose made him degenerate into other functions.

In the experiment, he has always been meticulous. He has tried more than 30 kinds of peas, conducted experiments for 7 years, pollinated hundreds of times, and recorded thousands of times. The hard work paid off in exchange for a very critical result, but the result was no report. What supports all this is belief.

He once said,

In his later years, Mendel lived very lonely. On January 6, 1884, he suffered from nephritis and died at the age of 61. When he was dying, he was relieved to learn that the chromosomes of hermaphrodite cells were halved when they matured, because his laws of inheritance had finally been strongly proved. He said to his friends,

Mendel was right, the time he expected had come. After performing 29,000 tedious cross-breeding experiments, discovering important laws governing genetics, publishing his work, and ignoring it for 35 years, the world finally recognized the value of his work.

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 sciences, human genetics, genomics, bioinformatics, and other disciplines. These blossoming achievements are spurred by the basic discipline of genetics, which has brought about the development of the biotechnology industry, triggered the green revolution, and ushered in a new era of biomedical science, all of which originated from Mendel's genius experiments and theoretical innovations.