Gregor Mendel at the source of genetics and systems biology

Abstract

Abstract Gregor Mendel is generally presented as the ‘ignored and solitary founder of genetics’. This Moravian friar would have worked in strict isolation on the heredity of peas in the garden of his monastery, and his experiments would have been ignored by his contemporaries, before being ‘rediscovered’ independently by three botanists in 1900, 34 years after their publication. Historians have contributed to replace the genesis of Mendel’s work in the context of his time, questioning the mythical image that prevailed in academic circles and the public perception. This paper recalls that Mendel benefitted from a very favourable context for the development of his experiments at St Thomas Monastery in Brno and was not isolated from the scientific community of his time. Although the notions on which his work was based were already present in scientific publications, this does not diminish the importance of Mendel’s contribution to the development of modern biology. We provide a detailed analysis of the results of his experiments on the development of hybrid plants that he presented in two lectures at the Brno Society of Natural History in 1865, demonstrating that beyond his major contribution to the foundation of genetics, Mendel was one of the pioneers of systems biology.