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Chicago Tribune
(MCT)
CHICAGO - Gregor Mendel made a scientific discovery 150 years ago that continues to revolutionize the world today, but nobody at the time took notice.
In fact Mendel, a gentle Augustinian friar and schoolteacher who did experiments on common pea plants when he could find time, had been dead 16 years before it became clear that he had solved one of biology's great mysteries, the secret of genetic inheritance.
Mendel has long been a hero of Field Museum President John McCarter's, who pushed to create a new temporary exhibit about the friar and his work that opens at the Chicago museum Friday.
The exhibit tells one of science's great stories, showcases genetic research that goes on today at the museum and, McCarter hopes, explains the science of evolution and genetics at a time it is under attack.
For the exhibit, the Field brought to the U.S. for the first time artifacts from the Mendel museum at the Abbey of St. Thomas in Brno, Czech Republic, the botanist's religious and scientific home his entire adult life. The exhibit will travel to four other American cities after it closes here April 1.
"Is anybody going to come here to learn about Gregor Mendel?" McCarter wondered last week. "We don't know. He's not King Tut. But Mendel's story is even more important to tell than the King Tut story."
McCarter cited a recent article in Science magazine that found many Americans reject the broadly accepted scientific theory of evolution. When compared to public opinion in 32 European nations and Japan, only in Turkey do fewer people believe in evolution than in the U.S.
Polls show perhaps 50 percent of Americans are inclined to believe in creationism, which relies on a literal reading of the Bible to conclude Earth is just a few thousand years old, not 4.5 billion years, as scientists believe. Rejecting the idea of evolutionary change, it also says God created all species as unchanging life forms and humans lived with dinosaurs before dinosaurs became extinct.
As the head of a major natural history museum, McCarter in recent years has dedicated a lot of resources to educate visitors about evolution. That includes spending $17 million and two years to recast its permanent exhibit on evolution, "Evolving Planet," and bringing in a major exhibit next year about British naturalist Charles Darwin.
McCarter pushed his staff to create the Mendel exhibit to bolster the museum's effort to tell the story of how science works and where evolution fits in.
"Mendel's work is the same science that we're doing here in the museum's research departments," he said. "The whole core of the museum is evolution and its story."
The son of a tenant farmer, Mendel was a schoolboy who so impressed his teachers that the Augustinian abbey in Brno accepted him as a novice. After studying science and mathematics at the University of Vienna, he was assigned to teach physics at the high school level. But Mendel's real passion was research, and the friars built a greenhouse on the abbey grounds for his work.
"He was the first person to apply the scientific process to biology," said Cheryl Bardoe, the Field's exhibition project manager.
Mendel took up the mystery of biological inheritance, which was puzzling the greatest naturalists of the time, including Darwin, who in 1859 established the theories of evolution and natural selection in his book "The Origin of Species." In 1856, Mendel began to plant 14 common pea varieties in an experiment devised to explain how plants and animals inherit traits from their forebears.
Mendel paired off unlike pea plant varieties, hybridizing smooth-skinned peas with wrinkled ones, long-stemmed plants with short-stemmed ones, yellow pods with green pods, and so on. For eight years he noted how traits appeared and disappeared through succeeding generations, using his mathematical skills to formulate laws of genetic inheritance.
"It was a stupendous, eight-year effort of one man working on his own," said Bardoe. "He raised 28,000 pea plants, closely observing the traits of 300,000 peapods."
The local scientific society in Brno published his results in 1866, and Mendel paid for 40 copies of the paper to be printed and sent to leading European research centers and scientists, including Darwin.
The paper is now considered one of the most seminal scientific papers ever, but few people read it. Twentieth-century archivists eventually found some of those copies in libraries, never opened, including one in Darwin's library. Brno was far from the great seats of learning, and Mendel was unknown. From 1866 to 1900, his work was cited in only three scientific papers.
Mendel was disappointed but remained confident he would one day be proved right. "My day will come," he told a friend, but when he was elevated to abbot in 1868, his work in science ended as he busied himself as an administrator until he died in 1884.
In 1900, three scientists in three countries thought they had figured out the inheritance riddle, only to discover the obscure friar had done the work 35 years earlier.
The exhibit uses interactive displays to re-create Mendel's work alongside what survives of his research implements, including his microscope. It also demonstrates the scientific revolution that genetics has inspired, from crop cultivation to studying the origins of life forms.
"We would not have evolutionary biology today if we did not have Mendel's discoveries," said Kevin Feldheim, manager of the museum's Pritzker Laboratory for Molecular Systematics and Evolution. "His ideas still apply to the research work we do today."
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For more information: www.fieldmuseum.org
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(c) 2006, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
