Gregor Mendel Timeline

In 1867, Mendel succeeded Abbot Cyril František Napp as abbot of the monastery, taking on significant leadership responsibilities within the Augustinian order.

After he was elevated as abbot in 1868, Mendel's scientific work largely ended, as he became overburdened with administrative responsibilities, especially a dispute with the civil government over its attempt to impose special taxes on religious institutions.

Mendel died on 6 January 1884, at the age of 61, in Brno, from chronic nephritis, before the profound significance of his work was recognized by the scientific world.

It was not appreciated until the end of the nineteenth century that many hawkweed species, on which Mendel had also experimented, were apomictic, producing most of their seeds through an asexual process—explaining his difficulties with those plants.

The profound significance of Mendel's work was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century with the rediscovery of his laws. By 1900, research aimed at finding a successful theory of discontinuous inheritance led to independent duplication of his work and the rediscovery of Mendel's writings and laws.

Erich von Tschermak, Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns independently verified several of Mendel's experimental findings in 1900, ushering in the modern age of genetics. All three researchers, each from a different country, published their rediscovery of Mendel's work within a two-month span in the spring of 1900.

The debate between the biometricians and the Mendelians was extremely vigorous in the first two decades of the 20th century, with the biometricians claiming statistical and mathematical rigor, whereas the Mendelians claimed a better understanding of biology.

Fisher as early as 1918 contributed to reconciling Mendelian genetics with continuous variation, laying groundwork for modern population genetics.

In 1936, Ronald Fisher, a prominent statistician and population geneticist, reconstructed Mendel's experiments, analyzed results from the F2 generation, and found the ratio of dominant to recessive phenotypes to be implausibly and consistently too close to the expected ratio of 3 to 1, raising questions about Mendel's data.

Mount Mendel in New Zealand's Paparoa Range was named after Gregor Mendel in 1970 by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, honoring his scientific legacy.

In a 2004 article, J.W. addressed the controversy over Mendel's experimental results, contributing to ongoing scholarly discussion about whether Mendel's data was too good to be true.

In 2008 Hartl and Fairbanks (with Allan Franklin and AWF Edwards) wrote a comprehensive book in which they concluded that there were no reasons to assert Mendel fabricated his results, nor that Fisher deliberately tried to diminish Mendel's legacy.

The exhumation of Mendel's corpse in 2021 delivered some physiognomic details like body height (168 cm (66 in)), shedding new light on the physical characteristics of the father of genetics.

In a 2022 biography, Daniel Fairbanks argued that Napp could hardly have given such a pronouncement, as Napp personally oversaw sheep breeding on the monastery's extensive agricultural estate, revising historical understanding of Mendel's mentorship.

The nature of the genes behind Mendel's factors remained mysterious for more than a century. The effort to identify them lasted until 2025, when the last three of the seven Mendel genes were identified in the pea genome, completing a long process of discovery of the actual genes.