Genetics 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 used today, is a somewhat ambiguous definition of what is referred to as a gene. Trait inheritance and molecular inheritance mechanisms of genes are still primary principles of genetics in the 21st century, but
54 Parkside the Royal Horticultural Society, of which he was also a Council member. He was appointed a member of the Appeal Tribunal (a special court set up to reconsider a decision by another court) for the County of Berkshire in 1916. One of his friends was William Bateson (1861-1926), an advocate of the ideas of Gregor Mendel who introduced the term ‘genetics’ to describe the study of heredity and whose 1894 book Materials for the Study of Variation was one of the earliest formulations of the new approach to genetics. Sutton provided the means for Bateson to carry out extensive studies