The title may not set pulses racing…but don’t be fooled. Alongside ‘On the Origin of Species’ by Charles Darwin in 1859 and the publication of the structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, ‘Experiments on Plant Hybrids’ by Gregor Mendel must rank as one of the biggest landmarks in the history of biology. Open any textbook of biology today and you’ll see Mendel hailed as the founding father of modern genetics for the work that he did in his monastery garden on peas. And as explained in ‘Mendel’s Martyrs’, his status as the discoverer of the gene was also enough to land Soviet scientists who supported his work in prison during the Cold War years.
But what was Mendel really up to with those peas? Professor Staffan Mueller-Wille and I are delighted that thanks to the support of the British Society for the History of Science we were able to produce a new translation of Mendel’s work and that this has now been published as a book by Masaryk University Press with forewords by historian Professor Patricia Fara and Nobel laureate Professor Sir Paul Nurse.