Mendel, Gregor (Johann)
奥地利植物学家和研究人员。1843年成为奥古斯丁会修士，後来到维也纳大学学习。1856年在修道院的花园里工作，开始进行实验，建立了後来遗传学的基础。他取具有明显对立的性状（植株的高矮、花色的有无、荚果的形状等）的豌豆进行杂交，得出结论：显性性状在不同的植株和它们的後代中的出现取决於成对的遗传元素，即现在所说的基因。孟德尔的资料中新颖的见解是提出基因是遵循简单的统计规则的。他的理论体系被证实具有普遍性，是植物学的基本原理之一。他在去世後才透过科伦斯、切尔马克.封.赛塞内格和德弗里斯的研究证实才闻名於世，他们各自得出相似的结论，并发现早在三十四年前孟德尔就已做出相同的实验资料和定出一般性的理论。
1822～1884年
Mendel, Gregor (Johann)
Austrian botanist and plant experimenter. He became an Augustinian monk in 1843 and later studied at the University of Vienna. In 1856, working in his monastery's garden, he began the experiments that led to his formulation of the basic principle of heredity. He crossed varieties of the garden pea that had maintained constant differences in such single alternative traits as tallness and dwarfishness, flower color, and pod form. He theorized that the occurrence of the visible alternative traits of the plants, in the constant varieties and in their descendants, was due to the occurrence of paired elementary units of heredity, now known as genes. What was new in Mendel's interpretation of his data was his recognition that genes obey simple statistical laws. His system proved to be of general application and is one of the basic principles of biology. He achieved fame only after his death, through the work of Carl Erich Correns, Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg, and Hugo de Vries, who independently obtained similar results and found that both the experimental data and the general theory had been published 34 years previously.
