Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics

The Rise of Genetics

As the 20^th century dawns, Mendel’s work is rediscovered and a new science is born.

In 1900 botanists Carl Correns, Hugo de Vries, and Erich von Tschermak each referred to Mendel’s experiments in their own articles on hybridization. At last, thirty-four years after its publication, Mendel’s work was pulled from obscurity.

By this time, improved microscopes had revealed deeper insights into the world of the cell, including the discovery of chromosomes and DNA. Some scientists saw clues to heredity in chromosomes’ patterns of division, and by 1903 they made the connection between the action of chromosomes and Mendel’s findings. In 1905 a British scientist coined the term “genetics” as the name for this new science of heredity and variation. Within four more years, scientists renamed Mendel's "elements" as genes.

Further discoveries occurred in Thomas Hunt Morgan’s “fly room” at Columbia University. Morgan looked at characters—such as eye color and wing size—over generations of fruit flies, connecting certain traits with individual chromosomes, and eventually “mapping” genes on the chromosome itself.

The biggest biological discovery since Mendel’s came in 1953 when scientists discovered the molecular structure of DNA. Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin at King's College photographed DNA using a technique called “x-ray crystallography.” Meanwhile, at Cambridge University, Francis Crick and James Watson attempted to create DNA models of cardboard and metal. It was only when Wilkins shared Franklin’s x-ray photograph of DNA that the structure—a double helix, like a twisted ladder—clicked for Watson and Crick.

This discovery marked a new era in genetics, and opened the door for the next generation to make more dramatic discoveries about the natural world.

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