The Monk and the Pea

Photo credit : www.gaurangimaitra.com & www.brnodaily.cz

The title of this week’s Green Cardamoms is inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale,” The Princess and the Pea”. I am unapologetic that the fairy tale inspired the title as this tale takes its stand among the many favorites that the pen of Hans Andersen so delight fully and memorably brought into our lives.I also have a more chronological reason for for the inclusion: the tale was first published in 1835 when Johann Mendel, the 15 year old protagonist of our story was at a gymnasium (grammar school) in Opava helping to pay his way by giving lessons to fellow students.

Opava lies in the Moravian-Silesian Region of modern day Czech Republic. It is to this region that we are drawn when we follow the lives and times of Gregor Johann Mendel. It is not that we are completely unacquainted with this region given that Bata, Skoda, Jan Evangelista Purkyne, Sigmund Freud, Ernst Mach, Franz Kafka, Josef Capek, Emil Zatopek, Antonin Dvorak, Ivan Lendl, Milan Kundera, the Bren light machine gun and Gregor Johann Mendel have come from this region. For the rest of our story we move to Brno, the capital of the Moravian region. For the rest of our story, we move to Brno, the capital of the Moravian region.

A twenty one year old Johann Mendel, joined the Augustinian Abbey of St. Thomas in Brno, we are told for many economic reasons. Yet, the course of his academic, scientific and religious career was to a great measure indebted to this abbey. The Abbey is unique amongst modern Augustinian foundations because it is led by an abbot instead of prior. For Mendel personally, this was a blessing as Abbot FC Napp is said to have supported and influenced Mendel’s development as a scientist. Thus when the parish work made him ill, the Abbot wisely used his authority t and allowed Mendel to become a substitute teacher at the Gymnasium in Znojmo and at the Technical College in Brno.

The prevailing law of the land required that Mendel acquire higher education for teaching. Thus between 1851 and 1853 the Abbot gave him the opportunity to study at the University of Vienna. Mendel studied Physics, Mathematics and Natural History, besides attending courses in Experimental Physics under Christian Doppler , Anatomy and Physiology of Plants with Franz Unger and even had Practical Lessons in using the Microscope. On his return1854 Mendel constructed the a glasshouse on the abbey premises, naturally sanctioned by his Abbot. Mendel would now teach physics and natural history att he realschule or secondary school, Brno.

Thus between 1854 and 1868 Mendel truly took on the mantle of the Monk and Pea ofour story. This appellation arose due to the fact he showed how characters could be passed on from generation to generation and how variation could arise using the pea plant as experimental material. Mendel worked through approximately 10,000 plants, used statisitcs to make sense of te pea plants in his monastery garden, resulting in the simple mathematical formulae towork out inheritancepatterns.

Two tragedies struck Mendel’s scientific work post 1868. The journal he had published his path breaking, excellent work had limited circulation and was not read by the scientific world at large till the year 1900; thus delaying its recognition as the beginning of modern genetics by almost 40 years. Secondly, thepassing away of Abbot Napp in 1865 meant Mendel became the Abbot and this left him precious little time for cultivation of iinheritance patterns; but he did go onto publishing 12 papers on his meterological observations.

Today you can visit the self same Augustinian Abbey with its Mendel Museum of Genetics and take a walk in the garden where Mendel like the princess was able to see through the layered generations of cultivated pea plants to give us his theory of inheritance.

Main resources:

1. Wikipedia
2. https://mendelmuseum.muni.cz/en
3. Mendel Museum of Masaryk University