A portrait of the founder of genetics now adorns the meeting room of the Dean's Office at the Faculty’s Bohunice University Campus (UKB). What is the picture like, and how does the faculty promote Mendel’s legacy?
Our faculty is proud of the scientific legacy of the father of genetics, Gregor Johann Mendel. This is the main reason why, at the request of the Dean of the faculty Tomáš Kašparovský, the PR department arranged for the production and framing of a reproduction of Mendel’s portrait. So, how does the faculty perceive Mendel’s legacy, a legacy that inspires its activities?
“It is, of course, primarily his legacy in the field of genetics; but it is also the interdisciplinarity of Mendel’s research and, in a narrower sense, his meteorological activities. From 1851 to 1853, Mendel studied mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology and palaeontology. In his scientific work he used combinatorics, biostatistical methods and probability theory. Our faculty is the only one in the Czech Republic that brings together experts in all the natural sciences and mathematics and, as a result, interdisciplinary research using statistical methods is widely developed at the faculty. And the Czech Antarctic Station bears Mendel’s name in honour of his meteorological observations”, said Tomáš Kašparovský.
The original painting forms part of the exhibition ‘Gregor Johann Mendel − The Story of a Modest Genius’. “The artist Zenker painted several portraits of G. J. Mendel. The painting selected for the meeting room of the Dean's Office at UKB was probably based on a period photograph by Antonín Mayssl”, said Mgr. Zdenka Broušková, curator of Masaryk University’s Mendel Museum, who is to be thanked for her cooperation throughout the entire process. The reproduction of the painting was printed by Tiskárna Letovice and the picture frame consists of three profiles of wooden picture laths and is the work of Petr Kopecký from ramovaniobrazu.cz and his workshop KOLIRA. Thanks also go to the Faculty of Science’s Department of Building Management for installing the painting.
After studying in Vienna, Mendel returned to Brno and, between 1856 and1863, devoted himself to crossbreeding peas and monitoring their offspring. Based on his experiments, he formulated three rules that later became known as Mendel’s laws of inheritance. In 1865, he presented his experiments on plants at a meeting of the Brno Scientific Society and, in 1866, published his work as ‘Experiments with Plant Hybrids’ (German: Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden). However, Mendel’s contribution to biology was not recognised until the beginning of the 20th century, long after his death. Not only did he define the principles now known as Mendel’s laws of inheritance, thereby laying the foundations for the field of genetics, he was one of the first to use biostatistical methods in his work.
And what is the history of genetics at the Faculty of Science, Masaryk University (PřF MU)? In their unpublished work on the history of genetics at the Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, Professor emeritus Jiřina Relichová and Professor Jiří Doškař from the Department of Genetics and Molecular Biology (Department of Experimental Biology) state “at PřF MU, Prof. Vladimír Úlehla planned to establish an independent institute of general genetics, but due to lack of staff, resources and space, the plan was not implemented. Further development of genetics at the faculty was thwarted by war and post-war socialism. The period after 1948 was very difficult for genetics. Under the influence of the Stalinist era of Lysenkism in the Soviet Union, genetics became undesirable and forbidden in our country; learning about the gene was just ‘a false theory that hampers progress in science’, and the term ‘mendelist’ became an insult”. In 1954, Professor Vladimír Rypáček planned to established a Department of Genetics at the Department of Plant Physiology under the leadership of RNDr. Ivo Cetla. Since 1965, when genetics was definitively recognized as a science in our country, genetic subjects have been gradually taught in their entirety. Efforts to establish the Department were fulfilled in 1967. After two years, however, the Department of Genetics was abolished for political reasons, after which it was affiliated to related departments. As regards the further development in the field of molecular biology and genetics, long-term stays abroad by Professor Rosypala in the sixties and seventies enabled him to become acquainted with the most modern techniques of molecular biology at that time, which was later reflected in the research and teaching of this field at PřF MU. In the 1990s, the Department of Genetics and Molecular Biology was established, which, following the establishment of Departments in 2008, became the Department of Genetics and Molecular Biology of the Department of Experimental Biology.
Less well known is the fact that, from 1862, Mendel was making daily meteorological observations for the Meteorological Institute in Vienna. In Mendel’s list of thirteen publications, nine concern meteorology. For this reason, the first Czech Antarctic scientific station, where our scientists participate in research, bears his name.
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