Pioneer 12 of 21 · 1822-1884

Gregor Mendel

Contribution. His crossing experiments with garden peas from 1856 to 1863, published in 1866 as Experiments on Plant Hybrids, laid the mathematical foundation of genetics, on which modern plant and animal breeding builds.

Factor coverage

Favorable entries (helped or barrier absent) and adverse entries (barrier or not overcome) by factor. Factor tags are this site's classification.

Biological00 Psychological00 Economic12 Societal11 Cultural00 Social22 Environmental00 Educational12 Technological00

Barriers faced

Factors	Statement
Economic Educational	His parents were struggling farmers who could not pay for his studies. He supported himself by tutoring, and his sister Theresia gave up part of her dowry to help pay for his education.
Economic	He entered the Augustinian monastery in Brno in 1843, later stating that his circumstances decided his choice of vocation.
Educational	He failed the teacher certification exam in 1850, and an examiner recommended further study in the natural sciences. At a second attempt in 1856 he fell ill and left without finishing, and he never became a certified teacher.
Social	He presented his results in two lectures in 1865, and his 1866 paper appeared in the proceedings of a local society. It was largely overlooked for 34 years.

What helped

Factors	Statement
Societal Educational	A monastery that invested in him. Abbot Cyril Napp sent him to the University of Vienna from 1851 to 1853, where he studied physics under Christian Doppler and botany under Franz Unger.
Economic Social	Land, time, and a local society. The monastery gave him garden space for his experiments, and the Natural Science Society of Brno printed his paper.
Social	Later scientists who reached the same results. In 1900 Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns independently reached similar findings and drew attention to his paper. Erich von Tschermak is often named as a third rediscoverer, though historians question whether he understood Mendel's ratios.

Not overcome

Factors	Statement
Social Societal	He died in 1884 without recognition for his work on heredity. After he became abbot in 1868, administrative duties and a long dispute with the government over taxes on the monastery largely ended his research.

Notes

Factors	Statement
none	Mendel corresponded with the leading botanist Carl Nägeli and repeated his work with hawkweed, which Nägeli also studied, but the results did not match. Historians disagree about whether Nägeli suggested the plant (Bicknell et al., 2016). Hawkweed mostly forms seeds without fertilization, which explains the difference. In 1936 R. A. Fisher argued that Mendel's data fit expectations too closely. No later study finds evidence of deliberate falsification (Franklin et al., 2008), and Fairbanks (2019) describes the controversy as essentially resolved, but statisticians still disagree about whether the fit is unusually close. Pires and Branco (2010) accept that it is and explain it by unconscious selection of repeated trials, while Ellis et al. (2019) found that Mendel's ratios do not depart remarkably from expectation.

Factors

Statement

none

Mendel corresponded with the leading botanist Carl Nägeli and repeated his work with hawkweed, which Nägeli also studied, but the results did not match. Historians disagree about whether Nägeli suggested the plant (Bicknell et al., 2016). Hawkweed mostly forms seeds without fertilization, which explains the difference. In 1936 R. A. Fisher argued that Mendel's data fit expectations too closely. No later study finds evidence of deliberate falsification (Franklin et al., 2008), and Fairbanks (2019) describes the controversy as essentially resolved, but statisticians still disagree about whether the fit is unusually close. Pires and Branco (2010) accept that it is and explain it by unconscious selection of repeated trials, while Ellis et al. (2019) found that Mendel's ratios do not depart remarkably from expectation.

Pattern summary

Element	In this case
Door-opener	Abbot Napp
Knowledge source	University of Vienna
Institutional support	Monastery, Natural Science Society of Brno
Built on recent work	Earlier plant hybridization research
Setback overcome	Failed his first teacher exam in 1850, then sent to Vienna
Barrier not overcome	No recognition in his lifetime
Related barriers	Poverty, unequal access to education, rigid gatekeeping

Not independently verified. Sources disagree on the year of Mendel's first teacher exam (1849 or 1850) and on the dates of his pea experiments (some give 1854 to 1864). This site follows the stronger or majority source.

Sources

Also relevant: Bell, A., Chetty, R., Jaravel, X., Petkova, N., & Van Reenen, J. (2019). Who becomes an inventor in America? Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(2), 647-713. All references