this video is brought to you by skill share an online learning community for creators with thousands of classes in design business more skill share is giving away two free months of premium memberships help you explore your creativity if you click the link in the description below that's for the first 500 people only more on them in a bit in February 1865 an Augustinian frost stood up before a small crowd in the moravian city of brenno and delivered a lecture that changed the course of history for the last eight years Gregor Mendel had been cultivating pees in his Abi's garden each plant had been carefully selected for its characteristics like tall short or yellow or green and then painstakingly crossbred to create generations of hybrids there is always not just a shed load of peas but a whole new science it was from Mendel's notes that the entire concept of genetics sprang a branch of biology that would fundamentally change our understanding of the world but here's the kicker no one would realize what a breakthrough Mendel had made for another 35 years at the time he delivered his lecture Gregor Mendel was middle-aged anonymous and virtually unknown outside of Brynner in his lifetime it travelled little experience bless and mostly just lived in his Abbey yet somehow this nobody single-handedly made one of the greatest discoveries in history today on by graphics we're delving into the life and the minds of Gregor Mendel and discovering how this one monk transformed our world [Music] of all the branches of science genetics may be unique and that's it can be traced back to a single person but if your vision of a man so brainy he can uncover whole new Sciences as some wild-haired Rick Stahl genius lording it over the simpletons around him prepare to be disappointed gregor mendel wasn't just a modest man he came from a background so modest he nearly didn't study science at all born Johann Mendel on the 22nd of July 1822 young Mendel was the son of farming parents eking out a living in the Silesian foothills in modern-day Czech Republic at that time this was still a part of the Austrian Empire one of the great powers of Europe and Mendel grew up speaking German but since nearly every location in our story has long since lost its German name we're just gonna use the modern Czech names when referring to places that way if you want to look stuff up later you'll actually be able to find it and also I'll do a whole lot better job pronouncing it Pimentel and his parents life in remote Silesia wasn't exactly easy the family was always teetering on the edge of financial catastrophe and more employment all hard earned no great dreams for their son beyond having him grow up and help run the farm that may very well have been Mendel's fate had it not been for one man when Mendel was aged 11 the village priest who also doubled as the local schoolmaster came to the family farm asking for a meeting there he told mr. and mrs. Mendel that their son was exceptionally bright indeed alarmingly so in fact the schoolmaster said Mendel was so clever that he should be allowed to continue his education now this wouldn't exactly have been music to the family's ears in the Austrian Empire sending a child off the secondary education often involved paying fees that most families just simply could have managed while Mendel's parents weren't dirt poor they also couldn't afford to spend crazy money on something as nebulous as learning but the schoolmaster insisted and eventually the family caved and so it was that in 1834 Mendel left his village for the first time and went to study in a partha for the gifted country boy life in industrial a parva wasn't exactly what you'd call enjoyable in a real city for the first time Mendel failed to fit in or adapt to the pressures that he felt to succeed he frequently fell ill plunging into deep dark depressions that would keep him from studying for days it was the first flicker of the disease that would come to haunt Mendel for his entire life but those black days were still in the future despite the strain at school Mendel graduated in 1840 having excelled in his studies in fact he did so well that his parents allowed him to continue to university in all mots a small beautiful city amid the rolling hills of Moravia Alamos is less than 70 kilometres from a PHA that must have felt like a world away gone was the industrial detritus of Silesia replaced by clear air and baroque majesty but even such Instagram ready surroundings couldn't stave off Mendel's black thoughts while at all amounts Mendel's mental health came close to total collapse twice he had depressive episodes so deep that he dropped out of his mouth studies living back to his disappointed parents both times though he eventually recovered enough to return to Allah moths but even then money worries left him badly overworked forced to tutor alongside his studies just to make enough money to eat but he made it through in 1843 Mendel graduated his parents must have breathed a sigh of relief finally although their son was coming home but home was the last thing on Mendel's mind depressed as had been in a LeMat sea still wanted to study he just needed a way to do so without any financial pressure suffocating him luckily in the Austrian Empire of the mid 19th century such a way existed [Music] one of the strangest things about Mendel's life story is just how much of it was made possible by other people at every important moment there was someone there to push him in the right direction someone like the village schoolmaster someone to like Abbot Cyril frantisek Knapp an Augustinian nab deeply believed in the Creed dictum percy antium ad sapien tiem which means from knowledge to wisdom as head of the adi and the great industrial city of Bruno some 60 kilometers from al-ahmad Sid devoted his life to building a center for study he supported his monks in scientific endeavours helps them get university placements without paying fees for Mendel this was exactly what he needed in 1843 he joins the order taking the name Gregor for the rest of his life Mendel would be based in naps Addie and Bruno and speaking of Bruno it's time we got to know the place that Mendel called home the Czech Republic second city brew new today has a reputation for being pleasantly boring the sort of place life is a steady procession of Sunday afternoons back in the mid 19th century though it was an industrial powerhouse a multicultural center where vast German Czech and Jewish communities rubbed shoulders from this melting point would spring minds such as Ernest mark and Kurt gödel musical talents such as lay Oceania Czech someone else whose talent was spotted by Abbott nap by the way in short this was the exact right place at the exact right time if he wanted to change the world not the Mendel have any inkling of his destiny just yet in fact his first years at the Abbey seemed almost to be a mistake part of Mendel's duties after being ordained was to visit the sick and dying of Bruno to offer them comfort but country boy Menzel founds the booming City so overwhelming and the lives of the poor they're so sad and squalid that he started to crack apart in 18-49 he had another breakdown this one plunging him so deep into the black ocean at the bottom of his mind that it took nearly a year for him to recover thankfully now was super enlightens where mental health was concerned he gave Mendel space to recover and then quietly assign them to a much less taxing job teaching and the much less forensic nearby town of snow mode for Menzel this seemed like the perfect combination he didn't just recover in Nomo he flourished sadly though it wasn't meant to last in 1850 the Austrian Empire suddenly shook up its education system teachers could no longer teach just because they were clever and needed work they now needed a qualification to set foot in a classroom and you could probably guess what happened next the strain of the exam caused Mendel's nerves to come back leaving him unable to continue teaching at this point it must have looked like the young man was destined for nothing more than a life of battling his illness with only the occasional ray of sunshine breaking in to keep them going but abbot Knapp thought differently the following year 1851 he encouraged Menzel to enroll at the University of Vienna which was just opening brand-new courses on science it seems the Abbott hope to give Mendel something to focus on to distract him from his problems instead he wound up handing Mendel's the keys to his future now you might not be heading off to Vienna to pursue science but there is no reason you shouldn't improve your skills and keep learning whatever stage you're at in your career or your life and that's where today's sponsor Skillshare comes into the picture now unlike some websites where you have to pay for individual classes with a premium membership from 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explore your creativity if you just click the link in the description box below that's for the first 500 people only but after that it's still super affordable at only around $10 a month so check that out there is a link below let's get back to the video if gregor mendel thought a parva and bruno were big we can't imagine how he must have felt when he first saw Vienna the carrot all of an empire that stretched all the way from the Alps to the Carpathians 19th century Vienna was one of Europe's greatest cities under the new Emperor Franz Josef it would soon grow to become a cultural and artistic powerhouse but if Mendel found the sprawling multi-ethnic city overwhelming he never showed it his two years studying in the capital passed calmly without a hint of the mental strain that had accompanied such moves before maybe the difference this time was that Mendel was able to get fully involved in his courses rather than worrying about how to make money in order to pay for them and what courses they were Mendel studied experimental physics under Christian Doppler of Doppler effect Fame and practical biology and a Franz Unger although forgotten today Unger was a leading light of Austrian biology in the 1850s and his closest equivalent is Richard Dawkins Unger was a huge proponents of the pre Darwinian evolutionary theory of hybridization which rejected church doctrine in favor of a natural if incorrect theory of how animals evolved naturally this made him a huge hate figure among the devout and Unger spends the entire period he tutored Mendel fighting off attacks in the popular press yet for all of the flak that hunger caught from the hardcore religious he doesn't seem to have repulsed the monk Mendel at all in fact he appears to have inspired him the year after he graduated and returned to Bruno 1854 Mendel approached Abbot Knapp with a plan he wanted to run a hybridization experiments in the ADI likely the biggest the world had ever seen at the time there was a huge disconnect between what was theorized about hybrids and what practical experience told you the orthodoxy was that an animal was an animal and didn't change no matter what so if you had say a Labrador and a poodle they might produce one hybrid offspring but future generations would revert back to being separate species but that didn't tell you with the lived experience of animal breeders who were like well do look at all these labradoodles where do you think they come from what was needed was someone with time and patience and mathematical training to investigate this problem across thousands of specimens and multiple generations in order to figure out exactly what was going on someone like Gregor Mendel initially Mendel wanted to run his gigantic experiments on mice but perhaps realizing that experiments or genetic research and things with teeth sounds like the setup for a terrible horror movie Abbott Knapp refused which is how Mendel came to settle on these thing we know him for peas starting in 1856 Gregor Mendel spent eight years breeding different types of peas and meticulously recording the results by juan county read and analyzed over 30,000 separate plants if that sounds like an extremely boring way to spend the best part of a decade well no arguments there but the effect it would have would be anything but dull in a short time this one monk working in his garden was going to overhaul everything the biologists thought they knew if you're wondering now why nobody had bothered to do this research before Hawaii at all the only one Mendel himself seemed flabbergasted by the lack of scientific interest writing this no one has concentrated on the number of different forms that appear among the offspring of hybrids no one has arranged these forms into their separate generations no one has counted them but there may have been a good reason for that the work Mendel undertook was almost painfully tedious the first stage was for Mendel to select varieties of peas to cultivate he wound up choosing seven types with binary characteristics that were easy to detect for example tall or short yellow or green and so on this was important because people looking into hybrids pre Mendel had been all like well okay these are all way different let's crossbreed them and kind of see what happens but Mendel scientific training made him more rigorous he only wanted to crossbreed those with opposing characteristics at least at first so that meant making sure the tall plants bred with the short ones that the yellow ones bred with the green it must have been insanely fiddly work the sort of work that would make most people question their choices in life yes Menzel kept it up he kept it up across eight whole years across uncountable generations of pea hybrids and slowly patterns began to emerge let's take flower color as an example one of the varieties Mendel worked with was pea plants that flower D the white or purple Mendel noticed that when he cross bred them the next generation of plants all had purple flowers it was almost like the whites had never existed but when Mendel took those hybrids and kept right on breeding them something interesting happened in the subsequent generation white flowers reappeared not many but roughly around 25% of the new generation of hybrids it was from this observation that Mendel's greatest work was born we don't want to get too far into the weeds with this we're a History Channel not a science Channel but we'll give you the bare-bones version of Mendel's conclusions the first was that certain traits what he called dominance like the purple flowers in our example while others are recessive like the white flowers these traits were passed down at random from parent to child the second was that these traits were all passed down independently of other traits so just because a white flower trait was passed down didn't mean that a tall plant trait necessarily came with it or whatever Mendel's third and final insight was that you could graft a basic statistical framework onto this to predict what traits might show up across the population it was from these key conclusions that the entire idea of genetics would eventually be born know that Mendel realized this although he theorized his findings could be applied to any living thing he seems to have repeatedly missed the implications in 1862 for example he read Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species without ever twigs that their work could be combined to explain so so much about existence yet Menzel wasn't so unworldly that he just kept his findings for the ADI he still wanted to tell people about his work it's just a shame that when the time came no one was listening in 1861 Gregor Mendel had co-founded the Natural Science Society and Bruno conceived as a place to discuss new ideas as well as an outlet for any work it's like-minded members did the Society soon became a key part of Brenner's intellectual life it also gave Mendel a useful place for revealing his breakthrough that revelation came on February the 8th 1865 that cold evening the society converged on a building in central Bruno there as the freezing members huddled around the stove Mendel gave the first of two presentations on his findings the title was experiments in plant hybrids and it ran to a mere 47 pages written down it wasn't designed to be ostentatious but it was revolutionary it seems those attending knew it to nandos two lectures became the talk of Bruno's scientific circles yet for some strange reason words never spread beyond the Moravian capital it wasn't for a lack of trying the Society published Mendel's lectures as a book in 1866 and sent reprints to libraries across the Empire they even sent a translated version to Charles Darwin in England's but Darwin simply did is what everybody did with Mendel's Berkey just put it to one side and forgot all about it the trouble was it just appeared so boring I mean great book on breeding peas thanks even those that did read Mendel's work often came away thinking it was applicable only to the vegetable garden so it was interesting if you were a horticulturalist it didn't help that Mendel refused to promote his own work seemingly resigning himself to not being understood he told a colleague in 1866 I knew that the results I obtained were not easily compatible with our contemporary scientific knowledge but perhaps the biggest reason Mendel's work fell into obscurity was loss in summer 1867 Abbot Cyril Knapp passed away aged 74 it was a real blow not just to the abbey itself but to Bruno as a whole with one of the great intellectual lights of the city gone the Frost looked desperately for a replacement someone who could take over from nap they found their man Gregor Mendel in 1868 Menzel became of naps old Abbi it was a great promotion the sort of life the poor farm boy from Silesia could never have dreamed of leading as a younger man unfortunately it was also a life crammed with responsibilities with no free time left Mendel abandoned his scientific pursuits his peas were forgotten his lectures discarded from his mind and that was it for the rest of his story if it was cruel to skip over a whole 16 years of a man's life like that but really there's nothing much for us to say from the moment he became Abbot Mendel did nothing of note he got older his eyesight failed he contracted Bright's disease and lived in some pain and he spent the last years of his life fighting the austro-hungarian state over new taxes levied on monasteries when he finally died on January the 6th 1884 he was remembered not as a scientist but as a familiar face around Bruno nothing more nothing less if people had been taking bets on his name being remembered in over a hundred and thirty years time you would have got fantastic odds sometimes a long shot comes in it would take decades more that Mendel would eventually become famous [Music] curiously the one person who seems to have been certain Mandel's name would live on was Mendel himself before he died he wrote to her friends my scientific studies have avoided me great gratification and I am convinced that it will not be long before the whole world acknowledges the results of my work he soon turned out to be more right than even he could have guessed the rediscovery of Mendel and the start of his influence on the world came about in 1900 there are three separate scientists all separately published work on hybrids that was suspiciously similar to Mendel's we say suspiciously because even today no one's quite sure what happened the official story is that Hugo DeVries Karl Erik Oren's and Erik chesh mark von Sasa nag Alda clans that made a breakthrough only to be astonished when proof was found that Mendel had done the same decades earlier however there's evidence each of these men may have read Mendel's book prior to their research and may have independently decided it was exactly obscure enough to steal without them being noticed regardless of how it happens though their papers made the scientific community turn back to Mendel's work for the first time in 34 years what they found blew their minds it was clear to people living in the 20th century that Mendel had hit on something big one of his new acolytes William Bateson even coined a name for what Mendel had studied genetics in no time at all Mendel was all the rage while the serious scientific community turned its nose up at the new science for several years more breakthroughs soon made the field respectable with that Mendel's legacy was secured today Gregor Mendel is remembered as the father of genetics the man from whose work everything in the discipline Springs incredible as Mendel's work is though what's more incredible may be that it happened at all looking back across his life story we can see that Mendel was one of those people history seems destined to completely pass by his life was so sheltered so anonymous that even the biggest events of the day barely touched upon him I mean this guy lived through the 1848 revolutions nineteenth-century videos by now to know that anyone who lived through 1848 had their lives changed by it but not Mendel he simply kept on working at the abbey tending to the gardens just as he did when Prussia invaded Bruno in 1866 just as he did when the Austrian Empire transformed into austria-hungary a year later it says something when a man can pass through history while leaving such little mark on it it makes you think who's to save is not another Gregor Menzel out there right now utterly anonymous to all but the members of one little society in the minor city he lives in beavering away at research that will one day uh Tinley transform our lives the story of Gregor Mendel then is not just the story of one man and his peas it's the story of how ideas persist how great breakthroughs can survive even when the mind behind them dies in obscurity Gregor Mendel is rightly famous today who the next Mendel might be and what life-changing research they may be doing well that's something we will have to wait and see so I really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do smash that like button below don't forget to subscribe also check it off antastic sponsor Skillshare they are linked to below and thank you for watching