“You look exactly like your mother!” “Like father like son.” Most of us might have heard comments like these. It is true that we resemble our parents. But why is it so? Because we inherit certain traits from them.
The fundamental laws of inheritance were discovered by Gregor Mendel. Through his work on pea plants, he deduced that genes come in pairs and are inherited as distinct units, one from each parent. For example, a man and a woman both with brown eyes could have a one-in-four chance of producing a child with blue eyes. Mendel published his discoveries in 1865 after spending eight years doing genetic experiments on pea plants. However, his work was disregarded by a vast majority.
It was Dutch botanist Hugo De Vries who realised the importance of Mendel’s discoveries in 1900. Many rules of heredity were established by Mendel’s experiments and are now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance. He gained recognition as the founder of the modern science of genetics posthumously.
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