The scientific work of Gregel Mendel, an…

The scientific work of Gregel Mendel, an Austrian monk who will be known as the "father of modern genetics", largely ends after he is elevated as abbot in 1868, as Mendel becomes consumed with his increased administrative responsibilities, especially a dispute with the civil government over their attempt to impose special taxes on religious institutions.

Mendel had been inspired by both his professors at the University of Olomouc (i.e., Friedrich Franz & Johann Karl Nestler) and his colleagues at the monastery (e.g., Franz Diebl) to study variation in plants, and he had conducted his study in the monastery's two hectares (four point nine acres) experimental garden, originally planted by Abbot C. F. Napp in 1830.

Between 1856 and 1863, Mendel had cultivated and tested some twenty-nine thousand pea plants (i.e., Pisum sativum).

This study had showed that one in four pea plants had purebred recessive alleles, two out of four were hybrid and one out of four were purebred dominant.

His experiments had led him to make two generalizations, the Law of Segregation and the Law of Independent Assortment, which will later become known as Mendel's Laws of Inheritance.

Mendel had read his paper, Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden (Experiments on Plant Hybridization), at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brünn in Moravia in 1865.

It had been received favorably and had generated reports in several local newspapers.

When Mendel's paper was published in 1866 in Verhandlungen des naturforschenden Vereins Brünn, it had been seen as essentially about hybridization rather than inheritance and will have little impact, cited only about three times over the next thirty-five years. (Notably, Charles Darwin was unaware of Mendel's paper, according to Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man.)

Mendel’s paper is criticized at the time, but is now considered a seminal work.

After completing his work with peas, Mendel turns to experimenting with honeybees to extend his work to animals.

He also describes novel plant species, and these are denoted with the botanical author abbreviation "Mendel"