Gregor Mendel: planting the seeds of genetics.

• Position: Botany

The life and work of 19th-century friar Gregor Mendel, a former high school teacher whose experiments were ignored by the scientific community for decades, is the subject of an exhibition now touring the country.

For eight years, Mendel grew generation after generation of pea plants and carefully observed the results. Over the course of these experiments, he grew an estimated 28,000 plants and counted some 300,000 peas. In 1865, he reported the results of plant hybridizing experiments and laid out the basic laws of inheritance--offering a tentative, but insightful, sketch of how physical traits are passed from one generation to the next. This groundbreaking work was ignored until the turn of the century, when it was rediscovered and confirmed by other researchers.

Since then, Mendel has come to be recognized as the "father of modern genetics," although the history of how he accomplished that remains relatively unknown today. The approximately 100-artifact exhibition traces the rise of genetics through its major milestones--from the discovery of chromosomes to the famous DNA model of James Watson and Francis Crick. While very few of Menders papers or personal possessions were kept, his botanical specimens, scientific instruments, photographs, correspondence, original manuscripts, journal, books, and gardening tools are on display.

Life-size photo murals of the Abbey library where Mendel studied, the Columbia University Fly Room where Thomas H. Morgan investigated the genetics of fruit flies in the early 1900s, and a modern DNA lab illustrate the changes in the scientific environment over the last 150 years.

The exhibition's "Modern Mendels" section provides insight on contemporary scientists who use Mendel's findings and their knowledge of genetics to learn about the world around them. This research includes applying genet ics in crop cultivation, studying origins and ancestry, mapping genomes, and solving new mysteries of heredity.

"Without Mendel's discoveries, evolutionary biology wouldn't have its foundation," notes Kevin Feldheim, manager of The Field Museum's Pritzker Laboratory for Molecular Systematics and Evolution, Chicago. "Although we use...