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The realization that traits and certain diseases can be passed from parent to offspring stretches back at least to the ancient Greeks, well before any genome was actually decoded. People often said that people and other things showed that they were 'blended' and that they showed traits from mom and dad that were blended.
That changed when a monk from Austria noted that when he bred pea plants that different out comes were seen. He spent many years keeping notes and records for the monastery.

The first person to put heredity to the test was Gregor Mendel, who systematically tracked dominant and recessive traits in his famous pea plants. Mendel published his work on the statistics of genetic dominance in 1866 to little notice.

But the painstaking work of cross-breeding pea plants wouldn't be unnoticed for long. In 1869, Swiss physician Johannes Friedrich Miescher became the first scientist to isolate nucleic acids, the active ingredient of DNA. Now the ideas that Mendel proposed made sense.

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8y ago

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