Pea to Pennsylvania

On a cold, calm February night in 1865, the members of a little science society gathered in the town of Bruenn, Austria, to hear a paper on inheritance in plants by an Augustinian monk from the nearby monastery. Gregor Johann Mendel wore a long, black coat and his trousers were tucked into his high boots. He was a plump, genial man with bright, blue eyes.

Mendel had failed as a parish priest because he could not bear to go near a sick or suffering person. At the monastery he did better. Breeders already knew that the characteristics of offspring were not simple mixtures of parental features, but they did not know why. Working with garden peas, Mendel found that when he crossed a tall pea with a dwarf, all the first generation were tall. In the second generation (self-fertilized) there were three times as many tall plants as dwarfs, and none of intermediate stature. From this and a mass of other results which made sense when fitted together, the monk concluded that characters are inherited as single units, and that the appearance of dominants (tall peas) and recessives (dwarf peas) is statistically predictable.

Such were the findings which Monk Mendel communicated to the Bruenn Society for the Study of Natural Science. None of his hearers seemed much interested and none asked questions. For 35 years the paper lay buried in the society's transactions. There is no evidence that Charles Darwin ever heard of Gregor Johann Mendel.

In 1900 three scholars of different countries dug up the Mendelian laws almost simultaneously, and the modern science of heredity got under way with a bang. Thomas Hunt Morgan made the tough, quick-breeding fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, the most famed insect in the scientific world, correlated hundreds of Mendelian characters with invisible transmitting agents called genes, strung out along the germ-cell chromosomes. It became apparent that Mendel's peas were priceless landmarks in the history of biological science.

Last year Dr. Samuel Weiller Fernberger, University of Pennsylvania psychology professor, visited the monks of Mendel's monastery. War had shifted the land from Austria to Czechoslovakia, and the town's name had been changed from Bruenn to Brno. Of the thousands of peas with which he had worked. Mendel had preserved and mounted only six, and half of these the monastery had lost or given away. Tactfully the professor told the pious men how, at his university, fruitful researches based on Mendel's laws were going vigorously forward. The monks decided to let the professor have one of their three remaining Mendel peas.

Ceremoniously last week Dr. Fernberger presented the relic to the University of Pennsylvania. It consisted of a few frail, faded leaves clinging to a spindly stem, starkly silhouetted against a rectangle of white cardboard.

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