What is Life? (Canto Classics)

by Erwin Schrödinger

The backbone of the theory, the law of inheritance, to successive generations, of properties in which the parents differ, and more especially the important distinction recessive-dominant, are due to the now world-famous Augustinian Abbot Gregor Mendel (1822–84). Mendel knew nothing about mutations and chromosomes. In his cloister gardens in Brünn (Brno) he made experiments on the garden pea, of which he reared different varieties, crossing them and watching their offspring in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, …, generation. You might say, he experimented with mutants which he found ready-made in nature. The results he published as early as 1866 in the Proceedings of the Naturforschender Verein in Brünn. Nobody seems to have been particularly interested in the abbot’s hobby, and nobody, certainly, had the faintest idea that his discovery would in the twentieth century become the lodestar of an entirely new branch of science, easily the most interesting of our days. His paper was forgotten and was only rediscovered in 1900, simultaneously and independently, by Correns (Berlin), de Vries (Amsterdam) and Tschermak (Vienna).