Word: mendeler
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...Mendel concluded that the reproductive cells of peas contain factors (now called genes) of two kinds: dominant and recessive. The gene for red-floweredness is dominant; the gene for white-floweredness is recessive. When red-and white-flowered plants are mated, the seeds produced get both genes, but the dominant red gene suppresses the recessive white gene. Result: red flowers in the first generation (see diagram...
Monk & Peas. Genetics got its recognizable start, along with relativity, quantum theory and nuclear physics, during the scientific revolution of the early 1900s, but it had a strange, unpublicized start more than 40 years earlier when Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk and natural-history teacher in Brünn (now Brno, Czechoslovakia), began experimenting with peas in the monastery garden. Mendel found that the parent plants transmitted their characteristics to their descendants in a predictable, mathematical way. When purebred red-flowered peas, for instance, are crossed with white-flowered ones, all the seeds grow into plants with red flowers...
Here was one of those extraordinary simplicities that can revolutionize a whole field of science. Mendel's observations proved that inside the cells of plants-and presumably animals too-is a mysterious mechanism, incredibly small, that rules heredity in accordance with precise mathematical laws. In 1866 Mendel published a paper to this effect in the proceedings of the Brünn Natural Science Society, but nothing happened. The world was not ripe for his ideas. In 1868, when he was appointed abbot of his monastery, his scientific career came...
...turn of the century, three scientists (Hugo De Vries in The Netherlands, Karl Correns in Germany, and Erich Tschermak in Austria) independently rediscovered Mendel's principles. They also rediscovered his long-forgotten paper, and gave him full credit; the basic principles of genetics are still known as Mendel's laws. Genetics, born at last to science's estate, went to work on the interwoven mysteries of life and heredity...
...lottery that deals the fertilized egg half a set of chromosomes from each parent, like cards dealt out to players in a two-handed card game. When maternal and paternal chromosomes are slightly different, which is generally the case, their dominant genes (units of heredity) suppress recessive genes, as Mendel's red-flowered peas suppressed white-floweredness. Each recessive gene is still riding its chromosome, and biding its time in obscurity. It can assert itself only when the corresponding gene from the other parent is also recessive. It may have to wait for many generations (in the case...