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NameDateIntellectual Devotional Biographies Reading: Gregor Mendel. Please use this reading on Austrian monk and biologist Gregor Mendel to answer the reading comprehension questions on the worksheet that accompanies it.Johann Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), an Austrian monk and biologist, founded the modern study of genetics with a series of painstaking experiments on thousands of pea plants in the garden of his monastery. In the experiments, Mendel was able to establish how specific traits such as size and color were passed from one generation to the next—an insight that changed the way scientists understand life on earth.Mendel was born to a peasant family in what’s now the Czech Republic and entered an Augustinian monastery in the city of Brno at age twenty-one as a way to escape poverty. The monastery supported the young friar’s scientific interests and allowed him to study at the University of Vienna; he was eventually promoted to abbot in 1868.The experiments on pea plant were intended to answer a single question: What determined the variation within a species of plants or animals? What determined if a plant was big or small, or whether its flowers were white or purple.At the time, most biologists believed that such traits were the result of blending. Under the blending theory, a plant with white flowers and a plant with purple flowers would produce an offspring with light pink flowers. Likewise, a tall plant and a short plant would produce a medium-sized plant.Over the course of his experiments, Mendel realized that the blending theory couldn’t be correct. Pea plants, he observed, always had either white or purple flowers, but never a mix. A single trait might disappear for several generations, but then reappear.Mendel hypothesized that such characteristics as size and color were controlled by genetic markers (later named genes) that were inherited from both parents. But after he published a paper in an Austrian journal in 1866, Mendel’s research was largely ignored. After his elevation to abbot, he had no time to continue his scientific experiments, and for most of the remainder of his life, he was enmeshed in a controversy related to the abbey’s taxes.Mendel died of kidney disease at age sixty-one. Fifteen years later, his paper was finally rediscovered, and shortly thereafter he was posthumously embraced as the father of genetics.Additional FactsIn total, Mendel examined seven different in his experiments, an effort that required 28,000 pea plants and took eight years to complete.Although Mendel showed that traits were passed from one generation to the next, he had no idea how the process actually occurred. That mystery was solved in 1953, when Francis Crick (1915-2004) and James D. Watson (1928-) discovered DNA.A research station in Antarctica, the Johann Gregor Mendel Antarctic Station, was named in the botanist’s honor in 2006. The Czech government also named a university after Mendel.Adapted from: Kidder, David S., and Noah Oppenheim. The Intellectual Devotional Biographies: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Acquaint Yourself with the World’s Greatest Personalities. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 2010. ................
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