The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,7

as it was in the days of Plato, is, in simple truth, ten times more important to humanity than all the chemistry and physics, all the technical and industrial science that ever has been or ever will be discovered.

—Herbert G. Wells, Mankind in the Making

JACK: Yes, but you said yourself that a severe chill was not hereditary.

ALGERNON: It usen’t to be, I know—but I daresay it is now. Science is always making wonderful improvements in things.

—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

The Walled Garden

The students of heredity, especially, understand all of their subject except their subject. They were, I suppose, bred and born in that brier-patch, and have really explored it without coming to the end of it. That is, they have studied everything but the question of what they are studying.

—G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

Ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you.

—Job 12:8

The monastery was originally a nunnery. The monks of Saint Augustine’s Order had once lived—as they often liked to grouse—in more lavish circumstances in the ample rooms of a large stone abbey on the top of a hill in the heart of the medieval city of Brno (Brno in Czech, Brünn in German). The city had grown around them over four centuries, cascading down the slopes and then sprawling out over the flat landscape of farms and meadowlands below. But the friars had fallen out of favor with Emperor Joseph II in 1783. The midtown real estate was far too valuable to house them, the emperor had decreed bluntly—and the monks were packed off to a crumbling structure at the bottom of the hill in Old Brno, the ignominy of the relocation compounded by the fact that they had been assigned to live in quarters originally designed for women. The halls had the vague animal smell of damp mortar, and the grounds were overgrown with grass, bramble, and weeds. The only perk of this fourteenth-century building—as cold as a meathouse and as bare as a prison—was a rectangular garden with shade trees, stone steps, and a long alley, where the monks could walk and think in isolation.

The friars made the best of the new accommodations. A library was restored on the second floor. A study room was connected to it and outfitted with pine reading desks, a few lamps, and a growing collection of nearly ten thousand books, including the latest works of natural history, geology, and astronomy (the Augustinians, fortunately, saw no conflict between religion and most science; indeed, they embraced science as yet another testament of the workings of the divine order in the world). A wine cellar was carved out below, and a modest refectory vaulted above it. One-room cells, with the most rudimentary wooden furniture, housed the inhabitants on the second floor.

In October 1843, a young man from Silesia, the son of two peasants, joined the abbey. He was a short man with a serious face, myopic, and tending toward portliness. He professed little interest in the spiritual life—but was intellectually curious, good with his hands, and a natural gardener. The monastery provided him with a home, and a place to read and learn. He was ordained on August 6, 1847. His given name was Johann, but the friars changed it to Gregor Johann Mendel.

For the young priest in training, life at the monastery soon settled into a predictable routine. In 1845, as part of his monastic education, Mendel attended classes in theology, history, and natural sciences at Brno’s Theological College. The tumult of 1848—the bloody populist revolutions that swept fiercely through France, Denmark, Germany, and Austria and overturned social, political, and religious orders—largely passed him by, like distant thunder. Nothing about Mendel’s early years suggested even the faintest glimmer of the revolutionary scientist who would later emerge. He was disciplined, plodding, deferential—a man of habits among men in habits. His only challenge to authority, it seemed, was his occasional refusal to wear the scholar’s cap to class. Admonished by his superiors, he politely complied.

In the summer of 1848, Mendel began work as a parish priest in Brno. He was, by all accounts, terrible at the job. “Seized by an unconquerable timidity,” as the abbot described it, Mendel was tongue-tied in Czech (the language of most parishioners), uninspiring as a priest, and too neurotic to bear the emotional brunt of the work among the poor. Later that year, he schemed a perfect way out: he applied for a job to teach mathematics, natural sciences, and elementary Greek at