Mendel's Impact

There are very few scientists who have made posthumous contributions to science, but the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel is one of these scientists. Mendel became a monk in a monastery that was filled with monks as dedicated to science as to prayer. From the monks, Mendel learned about the latest advances in botany. Later, Mendel attended the University of Vienna where he learned more about biology, physics, and mathematics. Some of Mendel's teachers of physics …

…work is the general approach it introduced to science. His major work laid the foundations for modern genetics. It was the rediscovery of Mendel's work that marks the beginning of the history of genetics, in which biologists in many countries conducted experiments to confirm and expand upon theories worked out in a secluded monastery in Brno. It was Mendel's outlook on science that eventually led to our understanding of how all life is now composed.