Definition for Gregor Mendel
From Biology Forums Dictionary
1) Gregor Johann Mendel was a German-speaking Silesian scientist and Augustinian friar who gained posthumous fame as the founder of the new science of genetics. Mendel demonstrated that the inheritance of certain traits in pea plants follows particular patterns, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance. The profound significance of Mendel's work was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century, when the independent rediscovery of these laws initiated the modern science of genetics.
2) Born in Heizendorf, Austria, Mendel's father was a peasant, his mother a gardener. After studying philosophy at the University of Olmutz, Mendel entered the Augustinian monastery, where many of his teachers also taught science and philosophy at the gymnasium or Philosophical Institute. Mendel was put in charge of the experimental garden, where he began the studies that would come to be identified as the founding of the science of genetics. Conducting impressively systematic and thorough experiments of hybridization of peas, Mendel accumulated evidence contradicting the current theory that inheritance was a "blending" or combining process.
Mendel's research was first presented at a scientific meeting in 1865, and in published form in 1866, but went unnoticed. In 1900, however, three separate scientists reported similar findings, despite having been ignorant of Mendel's work.