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Johann Mendel, better known as "The Father of Modern Genetics", was born on July 20, 1822. His place of birth was Heinzendorf, Silesia, Bohemia. As a child, Mendel worked as a gardener. This later became resourceful for his scientific studies. When he was older, he became a student at the Philosophical Institute in Olomouc. After two years of study, he entered Augustinian Abbey of St. Thomas in Brno. Upon entering the monastery, Johann Mendel changed his name to Gregor Johann Mendel. He entered as a teacher. In 1851, he was sent to the University of Vienna by his abbot, the superior of a monastery for men, to learn more about physics, chemistry, mathematics, zoology, and botany. Although Mendel did not graduate, he returned to the monastery in 1853 as a teacher, mainly teaching physics. Mendel also maintained the up keeping of the monastery's garden. It was not until between 1856 and 1863 did he begin his experiments to find out the how living thing get the characteristics they do. By 1868, Mendel was elected as an abbot. Gregor Johann Mendel died on January 6, 1884, in Brno, Austria-Hungary. He died from chronic nephritis, which is a disease that causes an inflammation of the kidney.

Gregor Mendel is best known for his work with pea plants. With all the research he gained, Mendel achieved an understanding of genetics. His experiment involved a group of true-breeding short pea plants and a group of true-breeding tall pea plants. He then took the two opposite groups and cross-pollinated them. He did this by Cutting off the male parts of one flower and dusting it with pollen from the other flower. By cross-pollinating the flowers, he found that the first generations of the new pea plants were all tall. Mendel labeled the offspring of the parent plant F1, and the parent plant P. In science today, the offspring of parents that differ in genetically determined traits are called hybrids. The hybrids did not blend the characteristics of the parent plant as Mendel expected. Instead, every plant took on one characteristic of one parent plant. The characteristic referring to plant height was tallness. Instead of the F1 plant, growing into a medium height the plants grew tall. Mendel needed an explanation for the reasoning for all the F1 plants being tall instead of a medium height. Therefore, to find the explanation Mendel did some more experiments. He created a second generation of plant, which he called F2. He created the F2 generation by cross-pollinating two plants from the F1 generation with each other. Surprisingly about one-fourth of the F2 generation turned out to be short. Now Mendel began to think about why the plants all of a sudden were beginning to grow shorter again. To explain this phenomenon he came up with a conclusion. He figured that each plant's structure is determines by genes, a type of DNA that determines what kind of traits certain living organisms receive. He described the genes as recessive or dominant. These types of genes are called alleles. An organism that contains dominate alleles will always show that dominate allele. For example, in Mendel's experiments the dominate allele was the plant being tall. In order for one of Mendel's pea plants, that he was experimenting with, not to be tall,