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Asked by jordandjess to Anouk, Chris, Judith, Leisha, Seyyed on 19 Jun 2012.
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Seyyed Shah answered on 19 Jun 2012:
People had some clues about inheritance for a long time. I know from reading into this topic, that as long as 1400 years ago there were people who had the idea that different characteristics were passed on somehow from parents to their children. Some of these people thought that the characteristics were changed over a period of time, so that people would change.
A famous scientist living in the 1800s, Gregor Mendel, found that certain patterns of colour and other features in maize and pea plants is inherited according to a fixed pattern. In the year 1910, Thomas Morgan showed that there are genes which are organised on chromosomes. There were a few other discoveries. The final piece of the puzzle was solved when the structure of DNA was determined in 1953 by Crick and Watson. So, I would say genes were discovered in the early 1900s, and many different people contributed to the discovery. you can read in more detail about the discovery of genes on Wikipedia and other sites online.
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Judith Sleeman answered on 19 Jun 2012:
The Austrian/Czech scientist Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) was the first person to propose a ‘unit of heredity’, which is what we now call a ‘gene’. He was an Augustinian friar and studied the inheritance of traits like flower colour in pea plants until he was made Abbot of the friary and got bogged down in paperwork! The term genetics (and subsequently gene) was coined by the English scientist, William Bateson, who helped to popularise Mendel’s ideas around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries.
Many hundreds of people since have discovered specific genes for particular traits and involved in particular illnesses, though.
I’ve not read back as far as 1400 years about ideas on inheritance, but I’m sure Seyyed is correct: I learned from helping with a course on ‘the history of genetics’ that we can be very short-sighted when looking backwards, if that makes sense!
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