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Mendel was a monk and high school teacher whose work (he spent a decade hybridizing pea plants in the monastery garden) was published in small regional sources
by jacobolus 9y ago
Mendel was a monk and high school teacher whose work (he spent a decade hybridizing pea plants in the monastery garden) was published in small regional sources and languished in obscurity for decades. Nobody at the time understood the importance of his work, and biologists continued under mistaken models of how inheritance worked. Decades later other botanists did similar experiments, and then stumbled over Mendel's papers, and credited him for first developing and experimentally validating the correct model. e.g. Correns http://www.esp.org/foundations/genetics/classical/holdings/c/cc-00.pdf http://www.esp.org/foundations/genetics/classical/holdings/c...
As far as I know Mendel's model was much simpler and more clearly defined than anything that came before.
- kurthr 9y agoYes, exactly, he discovered it well enough that people who read his papers years later didn't need for it to be discovered again. I agree, those at the time of publishing didn't even consider it to be about inheritance, but those later did, because his careful work could be replicated... even though Imre Festetics coined the word genetic and did similar work on sheep in the same town many years before (he's mostly forgotten).
- hamilyon2 9y agoCould it be that someone, in some obscure regional mathematics journal already proved abc conjecture in 30 pages. No one took his work seriously enough, and his work would be discovered by accdent 100 years after publication?