Marina Wallace: Why was the genius of the man who pioneered the science of genetics ignored for so long?

Taken from a lecture given by the senior lecturer at St Martin's College of Art and Design to a conference on genetics held in London

The crucial importance of Mendel's experimentation with peas lies in these fundamental facts: traits pass as unmodified units, individual Mendelian factors (which we now call genes), to successive generations according to set ratios.

Charles Darwin – whose The Origin of Species was published in 1859, three years after Mendel started his experiments with Pisum sativum, and six years before Mendel's paper on the results of his experiments was published in Brno – had maintained that:

"No one can say why the same peculiarity in different individuals is sometimes inherited and sometimes not so: why the child often reverts in certain characters to its grandfather, or other much more remote ancestor; why a peculiarity is often transmitted from one sex to both sexes, or to one sex alone, more commonly but not exclusively to the like sex."

Mendel proved that it was indeed possible to work out in a precise mathematical way how characters are inherited from one generation to the next. He was also responsible for pointing out that characters could disappear over a period of a generation or two, and reappear further on in the generation line. A grandchild could look little like his father, but noticeably resemble his great-grandfather. Mendel worked this out with methodical experiments.

In the process of putting together an exhibition on Mendel, I was reminded of four fundamental questions that reappeared in different ways throughout the time of the research and the installation of the exhibition:

Why did Mendel's publication not have the impact that it deserved in 1866? Why was Mendel's work re-discovered only 30 years after the publication of his paper? (16 years after his death)? Why had Mendel's discovery not been immediately understood and why was it understood in 1900?

Did Mendel cheat in his experiments? (The renowned Cambridge scientist, RA Fisher, got the ball rolling on this controversial issue when he wrote, in 1936, that Mendel's results were "too good to be true". Many followed suit).

The question of whether Mendel cheated in his experiments is indeed an interesting one. Mendel acknowledged, in his seminal paper on plant hybridisation, that others had carried out significant experiments, but he maintained that no one had systematically repeated the experiments.

Interestingly, the contemporary artists whom we included in the exhibition in Brno share with Mendel a great curiosity and a meticulous observation of natural phenomena, experimenting in their own way and with artistic means. The tradition of minute discrimination of morphological characters is exactly that in which some contemporary artists were trained in, and the constructional geometries of natural forms fascinate artists now as before.

Like Mendel's experiments, so the Mendel initiative, at the Institute of Molecular Pathology, in Vienna, was confined to a small exhibition, but the grand plan is to restore Mendel's experimental garden, with the aid of the newly formed American Mendel Foundation, in order to create a second Mendel exhibition, and eventually to establish in the abbey where Mendel worked the first museum of genetics.