Mendel Rediscovered: Three Botanists and the Birth of Genetics

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Gregor Mendel published his experiments on pea plant inheritance in 1866, but the work drew little attention for more than three decades. In 1900, three botanists working independently, Hugo de Vries in the Netherlands, Carl Correns in Germany and Erich von Tschermak in Austria, each arrived at similar conclusions about inheritance through their own plant-breeding experiments, and each, on reviewing the existing literature before publishing, discovered that Mendel had already described the same laws a generation earlier. All three credited Mendel in their published results, and the rediscovery, combined with the developing understanding of chromosomes in the same period, is generally treated as the founding moment of genetics as a formal science rather than a scattered set of breeding observations.