Why is Gregor Mendel so unique?

Answer 1

Gregor Johann Mendel discovered many of the laws of genetics before humans knew what a gene was. He experimented with plants like peas with flowers of different colours and discovered the relationship between dominant and recessive genes. He did this by taking the pollen from peas with one set of characteristics and fertilising the flowers of peas with different characteristics. He noticed that some genes were constant. If he bread tall peas and short peas he would get some plants that were tall, some that were short but none in between. If the genes for tall and short were mixed he might get three out of four offspring that were short and the other was tall. This means the short gene is dominant over the tall gene. By then cross pollinating successive generations he could predict with some certainty how many tall plants and how many short plants he would get. He was born on July 22nd 1822 in Austria and died on January 6 th 1884 in what is now the Czeck republic.