Gregor Mendel experiments

Gregor Mendel

Why do radish seeds grow into radish plants and not into cabbages? How is it that one puppy can be a different color from another in the same litter? Why are no two oak trees exactly alike? Questions like these puzzled scientists for a very long time. One of the first scientists to find some of the answers was Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk.
Mendel spent a great deal of time experimenting with the plants in the monastery garden. He worked mostly with garden peas. He crossed many kinds and kept a record of his results. His experimenting gave him some ideas about the nature of heredity—about how plants and animals inherit such things as color and shape and size from their ancestors.
Mendel's findings were published in 1866. But no one paid much attention to his work for about 50 years. By that time other scientists had carried on experiments much like Mendel's and their ideas agreed with his. Then Mendel's work was praised. It was called one of the milestones of science. Gregor Mendel spent his last years as the abbot of his monastery. He did not dream that his name would someday be famous.