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.

Erich von Tschermak, Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns independently verified several of Mendel's experimental findings in 1900, ushering in the modern age of genetics.

[9][10] Mendel was born into a German-speaking family in Heinzendorf bei Odrau,[2] in Silesia, Austrian Empire (now Hynčice in the Czech Republic).

[13] From 1840 to 1843, he studied practical and theoretical philosophy and physics at the Philosophical Institute of the University of Olomouc (German: Olmütz), taking another year off because of illness.

[17] When Mendel entered the Faculty of Philosophy, the Department of Natural History and Agriculture was headed by Johann Karl Nestler, who conducted extensive research on hereditary traits of plants and animals, especially sheep.

Upon recommendation of his physics teacher Friedrich Franz,[18] Mendel entered the Augustinian St Thomas's Abbey in Brno and began his training as a priest.

[21] After he was 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.

[25] Mendel, known as the "father of modern genetics," chose to study variation in plants in his monastery's 2 hectares (4.9 acres) experimental garden.

[26] Mendel was assisted in his experimental design by Aleksander Zawadzki while his superior abbot Napp wrote to discourage him, saying that the Bishop giggled when informed of the detailed genealogies of peas.

[27] After initial experiments with pea plants, Mendel settled on studying seven traits that seemed to be inherited independently of other traits: seed shape, flower color, seed coat tint, pod shape, unripe pod color, flower location, and plant height.

[32] Mendel presented his paper, Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden ("Experiments on Plant Hybridization"), at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brno in Moravia on 8 February and 8 March 1865.

When Mendel's paper was published in 1866 in Verhandlungen des naturforschenden Vereines in Brünn,[34] it was seen as essentially about hybridization rather than inheritance, had little impact, and was cited only about three times over the next thirty-five years.

[39] During Mendel's lifetime, most biologists held the idea that all characteristics were passed to the next generation through blending inheritance (indeed, many effectively are), in which the traits from each parent are averaged.

[44] Most prominent of these previous approaches was the biometric school of Karl Pearson and W. F. R. Weldon, which was based heavily on statistical studies of phenotype variation.

[46][47] Modern genetics shows that Mendelian heredity is, in fact, an inherently biological process, though not all genes of Mendel's experiments are yet understood.

However, the results of Mendel's inheritance study in hawkweeds were unlike those for peas; the first generation was very variable, and many of their offspring were identical to the maternal parent.

A persistent myth has developed that Mendel turned his attention to plants only after Napp declared it unseemly for a celibate priest to closely observe rodent sex.

[62] In 1936, Ronald Fisher, a prominent statistician and population geneticist, reconstructed Mendel's experiments, analyzed results from the F2 (second filial) generation, and found the ratio of dominant to recessive phenotypes (e.g., yellow versus green peas; round versus wrinkled peas) to be implausibly and consistently too close to the expected ratio of 3 to 1.

[70] Fisher accused Mendel's experiments as "biased strongly in the direction of agreement with expectation [...] to give the theory the benefit of the doubt".

[71] An explanation for Mendel's results based on tetrad pollen has been proposed, but reproduction of the experiments showed no evidence that the tetrad-pollen model explains any of the bias.

[68] If such a breakthrough "could be best achieved by deliberately omitting some observations from his report and adjusting others to make them more palatable to his audience, such actions could be justified on moral grounds.

They conclude: "Fisher's allegation of deliberate falsification can finally be put to rest, because on closer analysis it has proved to be unsupported by convincing evidence".