Genetics zinc finger, to edit the human genome in a way that can be inherited. In April 2015, Chinese researchers reported results of basic research to edit the DNA of non-viable human embryos using CRISPR. Genetics Genetics is a branch of biology concerned with the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms. Gregor Mendel, a scientist and Augustinian friar, discovered genetics in the late 19th-century. Mendel studied "trait inheritance", patterns in the way traits are handed down from parents to offspring. He observed that organisms (pea plants) inherit traits by way of discrete "units of inheritance". This term, still
Franz Unger of botany at the University of Graz and also taught at the Joanneum (which became the Universalmuseum Joanneum and the Graz University of Technology); in 1850 professor of plant physiology in Vienna. In 1852 he travelled to Northern Europe and to the Orient. Unger retired in 1866 and lived on his farm near Graz. Unger was one of the major contributors to the field of paleontology, later turning to plant physiology and phytotomy. He hypothesized that (then unknown) combinations of simple elements inside a plant cell determine plant heredity and greatly influenced the experiments of his student Gregor Johann Mendel.