Uniparental inheritance the days of an Augustinian priest known as Gregor Johann Mendel. The soon-to-be "father of modern genetics" spent his days conducting hybridization experiments on pea plants("Pisum sativum") in his monastery's garden. During a period of seven years (1856 to 1863), Mendel cultivated and tested some 29,000 pea plants which led to him deducing the two famous generalizations known as Mendel's Laws of Heredity. The first, the law of segregation, states that "when any individual produces gametes, the copies of a gene separate, so that each gamete receives only one copy". The second, the law of independent assortment, states that "alleles
Gregor Mendel elevated as abbot in 1868, his scientific work largely ended, as Mendel 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, Moravia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic), from chronic nephritis. Czech composer Leoš Janáček played the organ at his funeral. After his death, the succeeding abbot burned all papers in Mendel's collection, to mark an end to the disputes over taxation. Gregor Mendel, who is known as the "father of modern genetics", was inspired by