The Tragic Science Monk from Moravia

In 1865 the city of Brünn, Moravia (now Brno, Czech Republic) was an unlikely breeding ground for scientific discovery. Although politically Brünn served as the Austrian Empire's key German-speaking enclave within mostly slavic Moravia, it was not a scientific center like Paris, Leiden or Zürich. (The Austrian Empire was soon to become Austria-Hungary; the Compromise--kiegyezés in Hungarian, Ausgleich to the Austrians--between Imperial Austrian and Royal Hungarian monarchies was two years away.) Calling Brünn a "scientific backwater" may be too harsh, but it is not entirely inaccurate, either. Indeed, it did boast two scientifically-oriented institutions: the Augustinian Monastery of St. Thomas, where the Brothers of the Order taught and studied science, and the Brünn Natural Science Society. But these two institutions were hard to separate. The Natural Science Society was founded in large part by monks from St. Thomas. Both were fairly obscure on the European scientific stage.

Not surprisingly, then, hardly anyone of any scientific distinction payed attention when a local monk from St. Thomas gave a couple of lectures to the Brünn Natural Science Society about his plant breeding experiments in the monastery garden. The lectures were published the next year as a research paper under the title, Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden ["Experiments in Plant Hybridization"] and promptly ignored by the leading scientists of the day. Why it was ignored is no mystery. The paper's origin was certainly obscure--some monk with no advanced scientific training talking about his gardening experiences to what amounted to little more than a "nature-lovers club." Sure, there were some experiments, but the results were what one would expect from an amateur--they were wrong.

That much was certainly clear even though inheritance was still mysterious in 1865. People back then of course knew that offspring tend to resemble their parents, but why was not well understood. Obviously parents help determine traits in their offspring, but the same parents can create an apparently infinite diversity of children. And when parents with different traits breed, the results are often bewildering. In some traits, offspring look exactly like one of their parents. Other traits take an intermediate form. Still others look completely different from either parent. Sometimes the traits can be predicted by the parents, but usually not.

All of this was known to the scientific community of the day. So what of significance could be expected to come from an amateur speaking to a little-known science club about a subject that had baffled the most serious minds for centuries? It didn't help that the paper's hypothesis was absurdly simple. However, the author eventually got the attention of one of the leading authorities on heredity at the time, Carl von Nägeli, by sending him a number of letters trying to convince him that the results were accurate. To his credit, Nägeli took time to respond, but he remained unconvinced. Eventually the paper died of neglect, and the obscure monk from Brünn never published another paper on heredity.

Decades later, the study of heredity had finally matured sufficiently to allow science to take the first steps toward the correct theory. In precisely the same year, 1900, three brilliant scientists--Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erick von Tshermak--more-or-less independently stumbled onto the correct path towards the modern theory. They all recognized that theories of their time, often based on notions of a fluid being passed from the parents and mixing in the offspring, could no longer be defended in light of recent experiments. Instead, they correctly surmised, heredity must be based on particles, not fluids. Also, before these three, very few biologists properly understood the role of chance in determining traits. At the turn of the 20th century, probability was a relatively poorly-developed branch of mathematics, but this was precisely the branch of mathematics needed to reduce the apparent chaos of inheritance to orderly rules.

No doubt, everlasting fame should have been granted de Vries, Correns and von Tshermak for this discovery. Unfortunately for them, however, these same rules had already been worked out completely some 35 years earlier by an obscure monk who published his results in the equally obscure Proceedings of the Brünn Natural Science Society. Everyone in this obscure monk's time thought he was wrong. But by 1900 it became clear to De Vries, Correns and von Tsermak that he was actually right. To their credit, these three scientists resurrected the monk's paper and reputation, but by that time the original discoverer had been nearly 20 years in his grave. Today no one but specialists remember who Carl von Nägeli, Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns or Erick von Tshermak were. But literally millions around the world know the name of the "obscure" Augustinian monk from Brünn. You might have heard of him. His name was Johann Mendel, given the name Gregor when he took his monastic vows.