Gregor Mendel Gregor Mendel Gregor Johann Mendel (; 20 July 1822 – 6 January 1884) () was a scientist, Augustinian friar and abbot of St. Thomas' Abbey in Brno, Margraviate of Moravia. Mendel was born in a German-speaking family in the Silesian part of the Austrian Empire (today's Czech Republic) and gained posthumous recognition as the founder of the modern science of genetics. Though farmers had known for millennia that crossbreeding of animals and plants could favor certain desirable traits, Mendel's pea plant experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 established many of the rules of heredity, now referred to as the laws
Order of Saint Augustine the members of the order, but it was the great scientist Johann Gregor Mendel, abbot of the Czech monastery of St. Thomas at Old Brno in Moravia (d. 1884) who gave great credit to the Augustinian Order's scholarship in the 19th century. He was the discoverer of the Mendelian laws of heredity and hybridization. Given that the Roman Catholic Church in the Western world has been experiencing a decline in vocations to the priesthood and religious life since the 1960s, a relatively simple way to assess the vigour of this order is to compare the numbers of those in solemn