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Asked by killadwarf to Alex, Amy, Andy, Georgia, Ollie on 15 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by briton.
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Ollie Russell answered on 15 Jun 2011:
Im pretty sure it was gregor mendel (my second fav scientist). He looked at inheritance of traits in the sweetpeas he grew in his monastary. He discovered that some traits are dominant and some are recessive.
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Georgia Campbell answered on 15 Jun 2011:
It depends what you class as genes being discovered …Gregor Mendel discovered that inheritable traits followed set patterns of inheritance, didn’t know that genes or DNA were the method of inheritance.
The discovery of DNA from bateria in the 40’s was swiftly followed by confirmation that inheritance of traits coincided with inheritance of DNA, and that’s when we figured out that DNA was where the cell’s information was kept.
Finally, Francis Watson and James Crick (with a lot of help from Rosalind Franklin, who never gets a mention!) discovered how DNA is set up and works 🙂
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Andy MacLeod answered on 15 Jun 2011:
Mendel worked in the mid 1800s. He was a contemporary of Darwin although the two never met. Mendel noted that certain traits in the pea plants he was growing in his monastery followed specific patterns throughout the generations, and came up with the idea of a discrete unit of inheritance.
However, no-one really noticed when Mendel published his work at the time, and he was dead by the time people started taking notice in the early 1900s. The first recorded use of the word “genetics” comes from William Bateson in 1905, and the first recorded use of the word “gene” was from a Danish Botanist called Wilhelm Johannsen that same year to describe Mendel’s “unit of inheritance”. These men, and a handful of others, were instrumental in getting Mendel’s idea to a wider audience, although they weren’t immediately accepted. There was still some quite heated debates between scientists about the nature of heredity throughout the early part of the 20th century.
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