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The modern science of genetics traces its roots to the observations made by Gregor Johann Mendel, a German-Czech Augustinian monk and scientist who made detailed studies of the nature of inheritance in plants. In his paper “Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden” (”Experiments on Plant Hybridization”), presented in 1865 to the Brunn Natural History Society, Gregor Mendel traced the inheritance patterns of certain traits in pea plants and showed that they could be described mathematically. Although not all features show these patterns of Mendelian inheritance, his work suggested the utility of the application of statistics to the study of inheritance.
The significance of Mendel’s observations was not understood until early in the twentieth century, after his death, when his research was re-discovered by other scientists working on similar problems. The word “genetics” itself was coined in 1905 by William Bateson, a significant proponent of Mendel’s work, in a letter to Adam Sedgwick. The adjective “genetic” (derived from the Greek word “genno” γεννώ: to give birth) predates the noun, dating back to the 1830’s and first used in the biological sense in 1859 by Charles Darwin in the The Origin of Species. Bateson publicly promoted and popularized usage of word “genetics” to describe the study of inheritance in his inaugural address to the Third International Conference on Plant Hybridization in London, England, in 1906.
In the decades following rediscovery and popularization of Mendel’s work, numerous experiments sought to elucidate the molecular basis of DNA. In 1910 Thomas Hunt Morgan argued that genes reside on chromosomes, based on observations of a sex-linked white eye mutation in fruit flies. In 1913 his student Alfred Sturtevant used the phenomenon of genetic linkage and the associated recombination rates to demonstrate and map the linear arrangement of genes upon the chromosome.
Morgan’s observation of sex-linked inheritance of a mutation causing white eyes in Drosophila led him to the hypothesis that genes are located upon chromosomes.
