Mendel of the Minors

 

I recently picked up for a summer read “The Gene” by Siddhartha Mukherjee. As I began to plow through the nearly 600-page book, it seemed to display the accidents and unforeseen circumstances that can track scientific research and technological innovation.

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The Gene begins with Gregor Mendel in the monastery in Brno, now a part of the Czech Republic. There the eventual founder of the science of genetics is perceived as slow, happy in the garden with his peas, not smart or articulate enough to be more than a substitute teacher. The friar abbots try and give him every chance to gain a useful education, and perhaps step up from substitute. And by some phenomenal luck, he’s sent to study in Vienna. Thus, to study under no less than Doppler.

Yes, he comes to study under Austrian physicist Christian Doppler, the mathematician and physicist who proposed that the perceived pitch of sound or the color of light was not fixed but depended on the relative locations and velocities of the observer and the source. His principles on the nature of change in wave frequency influence work that led to today’s radio astronomy efforts, radar, sonar, and more. It must be seen as a happy accident, for Mendel to learn from Doppler.

Mendel patiently raised peas in his garden. He experimentally crossbred the pea plants and dutifully documented the results. Some viewers have seen him as a plodder, with no theoretical understanding of underlying forces at work. But author Mukherjee assures that Mendel knew “he was trying to unlock the material basis and laws of heredity.”

The author also writes that Doppler’s example as a physicist informed Mendel’s efforts. Mendel found in bits of different bits of data on plants – height, texture, color –  the elements that could reveal an underlying pattern that could be described numerically. That is, a numerical model that marked the inheritance of traits.

This ended up in a research paper presented to the Natural Science Society in Brno. But Mendel’s station at the far reaches of the scientific community assigned his work to a type of oblivion that was a long time in lifting.

Mukherjee cites a geneticist describing this as “one of the strangest silences in the history of biology.”

The Mendel story contrasts with Darwin’s story in Mukherjee's work. Darwin had a position close to the center in the scientific culture of his day. But Darwin and others struggled to move the science of heredity forward after the big bang of Origin of the Species.

The mechanism was already described in some measure by Mendel but his duties as a cleric and clerk led him to be “choked by administrative work,” and his paper became for him a capstone. Gradually over decades his work was discovered and replicated, eventually triggering a general evangelization of Mendel.

In terms of the initial wilting on the vine of Mendel’s work, there wasn’t anything that couldn’t really have been foreseen. As Mukherjee observes, Darwin’s reading of his keystone paper  took place at the Linnean Society in London. Mendel presented at the Natural Science Society of Brno, far afield. That Mendel's work slashed steadily, like a scythe through the pages of time, until it reached an audience, speaks volumes for its worth.