Gregor Mendel’s 200th Birthday: What We Learned from the Father of Modern Genetics

This month, scientists around the world are celebrating the 200th birthday of Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics. But even non-scientists may remember studying Mendel’s Punnett square diagrams, which is how many people learned the fundamentals of plant breeding and genetics in school.

Mendel was born July 20, 1822, and raised at his family’s farm in Austria before becoming a monk. It was in the monastery garden?that he carried out experiments crossing varieties of common pea plants that led him to discover the three principles of inheritance that he proposed in 1865 to describe how genetic traits are passed from one generation to the next.

?Mendel recorded and compared the visible traits of nearly 28,000 plants over eight years. He was ever the learner and used this data to inform the direction of his work. Mendel’s meticulous notes from previous experiments helped determine which questions he should explore next and how the next experiment should be set up. Eventually, leveraging his knowledge gained from his curiosity, Mendel formed statistical trait inheritance predictions to support scaling his experiments beyond peas.

Mendel and his team developed 22 unique varieties of pea plants. His work was largely unknown until long after his death in 1884, when it was discovered by scientists of the time, and they began referring to his principles of inheritance as Mendel’s Laws.

Plant Breeding, 200 Years Later

Just as Mendel’s discoveries changed our understanding of genetic inheritance, I think Bayer Crop Science’s focus on Precision Breeding will change how we deliver the next generation of products and solutions for our grower customers around the world. Building on Mendel’s work, we won’t just breed great seed traits, we’ll design them from the start with our customers’ needs driving every decision we make.

Additionally, like the curious, continuous learner Mendel was, Bayer is a curious company. This is especially true for our plant breeding organization where we are always experimenting, always learning, in order to provide our growers the best solutions in seeds and traits.

Since we began our move from Breeding 3.0 to Precision Breeding, my colleagues have achieved many great advancements that support our vision of Health for all, Hunger for none, including short-stature corn which is being now combined with innovations from elsewhere in the organization to provide growers with Bayer’s Smart Corn System.

Pictured here you can see how Short Corn fared compared to traditional corn following a recent Derecho event at one of our Plant Breeding Field Testing plots in North America. Photo by Richard Judge, technical agronomist. (Short corn is in the center, and traditional corn is on the left and right sides.)

Looking to the Future

As we move into the second half of 2022 and look ahead to next year, I think of this quote:

“For most of us, the problem isn't that we aim too high and fail.

It's just the opposite; we aim too low and succeed.”

- Sir Ken Robinson

At Bayer Crop Science, we are aiming high for the future of modern genetics with our focus on Precision Breeding. We set our target concepts, then design and evaluate through iteration until we design the best seed for our growers’ specific field conditions. This makes the big successes possible.

Our future success is made possible by the discoveries of brilliant people like Mendel. It’s a great honor to follow in his footsteps and continue his important work in plant breeding, supporting our growers and feeding a growing population.