Book- 128 pages
- Level: all audiences
This 1997 book by Roger Klare is part of the Enslow Publishers Great Minds of Science series. It provides an overview of Fr. Gregor Mendel’s life and work that is oriented towards younger readers, and that is based largely on the biography of Mendel by Hugo Iltis. From the publisher:
Gregor Mendel is known as the father of genetics. Genetics is the science of explaining how parents pass certain characteristics to their offspring. Mendel was an Austrian monk. He experimented with peas and other plants in the garden of the St. Thomas Monastery in what is now the Czech Republic. Mendel would cross-breed pea plants with different traits—round peas and wrinkled peas, for example. He wanted to see what their offspring were like. His experiments led to some startling discoveries.
Though Mendel thought he had discovered something important, he never knew just how important his work really was. When Mendel published the results of his work in 1866, no one paid any attention. In 1900, sixteen years after Mendel’s death, his work was rediscovered. The world at last understood the importance of Mendel’s discoveries, and the science of genetics was born. For his groundbreaking work in the study of heredity, Gregor Mendel is remember as one of the great minds of science.
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