Pea Stories. Why was Mendel's Research Ignored in 1866 and Rediscovered in 1900?

Abstract

The story of Mendel’s research is one of the highlights in the history of the life sciences. It has become a scientific legend. In 1865, after 8 long years of careful, time-consuming and laborious experiments with Pisum Sativum (the common garden pea), father Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) of the Augustinian monastery of Brünn (now: Brno) recorded and analysed his findings in a two-part lecture before the Brünn Society for Natural History. Subsequently, he published, in the society’s proceedings, a forty four-page article on which his fame still rests (Mendel 1866/1913). He dispatched several copies of it to leading experts in biology and botany but apparently, hardly anyone took notice of it. He did receive an answer from Professor Carl Nägeli of the University of Munich, but even he took 2 months to reply. And instead of becoming interested in Mendel’s work, Nägeli tried to persuade him to participate in a research programme of his own. And indeed, in the correspondence that subsequently evolved, Mendel offered his services as an unpaid research assistant, more or less. Mendel had hoped that Nägeli would assess, and even repeat, his experiments on Pisum Sativum, but instead the latter urged him to join his experiments on Hieracium (hawkweed). Their correspondence lingered on for some years (they continued to exchange letter until 1873), centring around Mendel’s discouraging problems with his Hawkweed-trials, but eventually it ended in silence. For years to come, Mendel’s masterpiece was virtually ignored. Although his article was cited every now and then, it failed to really impress his contemporaries. Then, all of a sudden, in the spring of 1900, his paper was unearthed and rediscovered, posthumously, by three different scholars, simultaneously but independently from one another. They were all active in what was about to become the field of genetics. All of a sudden, Mendel’s paper became a scientific classic, the starting point of a new style of research, and its impact was enormous. It was the beginning of a dramatic transition of biology as a field. As a result, researchers suddenly became interested in this enigmatic author, who was almost totally unknown among professionals. But even today, Mendel remains a surprisingly obscure figure. After decades of historical research, data on Mendel’s life and work are remarkably sparse, compared to what we know about some of his contemporaries such as, for example, Charles Darwin (1809–1882) or Louis Pasteur (1822–1895).