Science at a Distance



	Gregor (Johann) Mendel 1822 - 1884 A man for his times.
	Three revolutions and a civil war mark the beginning, middle and end of the 19th century. Napoleon and the French Revolution opened the doors, sweeping away an age old Monarchy and with it the almost unquestioned belief in the divine rights of Kings. Across an ocean, and in the middle of the century, the American civil war started almost by accident, but culminated in the removal forever of an institution almost as old as mankind - slavery. While in Europe during these middle years the smaller revolutions of 1848 redefined the relationships between church, state and the peoples they served. Towards the end, the Russian revolution ensured that the century closed as it had begun, with a fundamental realignment of a power structure that had been in place since the time of the Mongols. Revolutions, it seemed, were taking place everywhere. But revolutions are not limited to people, power and politics. Revolutions also take place in less dramatic ways than war and in fields other than how we are governed. During the 19th century a pent-up mass of intellectual energy was released by a flood of human geniuses in ways that revolutionized the way we understand the world around us and how it works. Almost all the 'great mysteries' were stripped of their 'mystery'.
	Solids, liquids and gasses had their seemingly infinite properties reduced to the few laws that describe the behavior of atoms. Electricity, a 'mysterious fluid', was transformed by Volta, Gauss, Ampere and later Faraday into a practical phenomenon that would one day make this computer possible. Disease was finally understood to be a side effect of microscopic life, and medicine moved from blood letting to blood chemistry. Metaphysical speculation was taken out of the mainstream of human thought and reduced to the musings of philosophers, overthrowing an intellectual process that went back to the Greeks. Even the origins of life, perfectly understood by anyone who could read a Bible, were questioned by an English gentleman who, after a trip around the world, hesitantly published a theory that 'descent with modification', or 'evolution', could account for the amazing diversity of living things on his planet. Darwin understood the nature of revolutions perfectly, but a less likely revolutionary it would be hard to find.
	Hidden away in the middle of the century and in the middle of Europe was a monk. Born in a tiny village and given the name Johann, this boy grew up to be one of the major intellectual revolutionaries of his age, a fact that neither he, nor anyone else around him realized until long after his death. Johann Mendel came into this world on July 22, 1822 and, although a son of a peasant farmer, was educated far beyond his humble origins. Poor, sickly and ill-fed, he was lucky that his intellectual talents were spotted by his teachers and later his professors, who, when he was looking for work, helped him get an interview with the Abbot of a Moravian monastery. This institution was looking for teachers and researchers. Abbot Napp took a liking to Johann Mendel and, much to the young man's relief, offered him a position in the Order of Augustinians. Napp's monastery was light on religion but heavy on science, and Mendel took the offer at once. He also took the name Gregor and was thereafter known as Gregor Mendel. Shortly after joining the monastery the young monk was swept up by his more politically active companions into the events of the 1848 revolution, but politics were not his strength and he quickly abandoned them for science and teaching. Religious orders, like his, were under strong pressure to teach in local schools, and Mendel found he liked teaching, even if he could never quite pass enough examinations himself to acquire the appropriate credentials. His other great interest was in science, particularly the rules and laws governing the hybridization of plants. Using a common garden vegetable, the pea plant, as his experimental organism, he set about studying how characteristics such as flower color were inherited. When he started his work no one knew anything about the principles of heredity, or even that there were laws governing this phenomenon. Hippocrate's ideas of pangenesis were universally accepted (even by Darwin), and St. Augustine had said that God endowed matter with certain powers of self-development, so it was far from certain that there even were 'laws'. Linnaeus in Sweden had developed a classification system that depended on the fixed nature of species, so plant hybrids, mixtures of two different plant parents, were a problem. Mendel wanted to solve that problem. He did.
	In a series of breathtakingly brilliant experiments he devised a logical path of investigation, applied it to the obscure topic of hybridization, obtained large quantities of results, interpreted those results by an astonishing feat of intellectual reasoning, single-handedly opened up a whole new field of biology, gave the world a startling new concept and eventually published his work. All to deafening silence. Even scientists like Charles Darwin, who needed Mendel's fundamental discoveries to explain their own work, did not understand the significance of what the monk was saying. So it remained through the rest of the century and long after Mendel's death. There have been a lot of explanations as to why this should be so, but two seem more probably than others.
	Mendel was ahead of his time. His discovery was so far in front of human understanding, even in an era where science was rushing forward at a breakneck pace, that people just had not the conceptual framework in which to view his results and make them part of their own thought process. More likely, Mendel published his work in a relatively obscure journal which sat on library shelves unopened. He didn't follow up on any of his findings, he never held a high profile position in a University or institute, he never traveled and his circle of scientific friends was very limited. Despite his abilities as a teacher, he never had research pupils and never had a 'school' of followers. He was just a modest man who eventually became the Abbot of his monastery, a bank executive, a bee enthusiast, and a bit of a meteorologist. Genetics was independently re-discovered in the following century, but this in no way diminishes the genius of Mendel. Amid the revolutions and revolutionaries of his time, Brother Gregory was a humble man who cast a long shadow.

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Science at a Distance
© 1999, 2000 Professor John Blamire