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
History of model organisms respective work on natural selection and the genetics of heredity. These early works in finding standards to compare organisms against continued into the 20th century as the first model organisms were brought into laboratories. Beginning in the early 1900s "Drosophila" entered the research laboratories and opened up the doors for other model organisms like Tobacco mosaic virus, E. coli, C57BL/6 (lab mice), etc. These organisms have led to many advances in the past century. Some of the first work with what would be considered model organisms started because Gregor Johann Mendel felt that the views of Darwin were insufficient in