Genetics in fiction a genetic accident with disastrous consequences; or, the feasibility and desirability of a planned genetic alteration. The treatment of science in these stories has been uneven and often unrealistic. The film "Gattaca" did attempt to portray science accurately but was criticised by scientists. Modern genetics began with the work of the monk Gregor Mendel in the 19th century, on the inheritance of traits in pea plants. Mendel found that visible traits, such as whether peas were round or wrinkled, were inherited discretely, rather than by blending the attributes of the two parents. In 1900, Hugo de Vries and other scientists
Muriel Wheldale Onslow teachings. In 1900 she entered Newham College, Cambridge and took a class in Natural Sciences Tripos. In 1903 she joined William Bateson's genetics lab at Cambridge where she began her study focusing on the interaction of factors and of the inheritance of petal color in Antirrhinum (snapdragons). William Bateson was the English biologist who was the first person to use the term genetics to describe the study of heredity, and the chief populariser of the ideas of Gregor Mendel following their rediscovery in 1900. Bateson and Onslow carried out a series of breeding experiments in various plant and animal species