GREGOR MENDEL

It's not a good thing if you stutter.  It's a speech impediment that most (like me) outgrow.  When I was young, my mind worked faster than my tongue and it couldn't keep up.  I'd stutter. Now, my tongue works faster than my mind - I'm still trying to think of the words I wanted to say yesterday.  But, I digress.

My subject is a man who lived in the middle of the 19th century (1822-1884).  He grew up on farm in the part of the Austrian Empire we now know as the Czech Republic.  They were poor and unable to afford the best schools, so Gregor entered the Augustinian Monastery as a means to an education. 

It wasn't long before he thought he was destined to be a priest but he spoke so poorly his mentors  thought he could never preach.  He was a great student so he thought he would be a teacher.  He failed the oral part of the test to qualify - twice. 

Mendel left the monastery to pursue higher education in Vienna and returned when it was completed - he returned to spend the rest of his life as a friar, a monk.  What do monk's do?  They have a lot of time on their hands. 

Mendel's early life on his family's farm taught him beekeeping and made him aware of the cycle of life and apt at growing things.  He started studying plants by growing peas.  He limited which plants his bees could pollinate.  He grew peas and he grew peas and made notes on them all.  He studied how they looked and developed his theory of heredity.  He even published his Rules of Heredity.  His  papers were sent to the scientific community.  They didn't understand what it was all about.

Charles Darwin was making a big splash in the world at this time with his study "On the Origin of Species" and his theory of evolution by natural selection.  This was something scientists could understand.  Mendel went on to give up scientific research and became abbot of the monastery.

It was some twenty years after his death that scientists took another look at his work and his lectures.  Some were repeating Mendel's experiments and confirming his findings.  What to make of that?  One man, Thomas Hunt Morgan, an American who won a Nobel prize for his work, repeated Mendel's work using fruit flies.  Tada!  Similar findings.

Anyway (my progeny don't like it when I go on too long), Gregor Mendel, who couldn't speak very well, went on to become known as "the father of modern genetics."  One hundred-fifty years ago, he started what we are seeing right now - the unraveling of the human genome.  In the next century, genetics could become a high school elective.  Speaking clearly will always be a problem for some  but, at times, it will produce great things.