Gregor Mendel is the father of genetics. He:
• Founded the science of genetics.
• Identified many of the rules of heredity. These rules determine how traits are passed through generations of living things.
• Saw that living things pass traits to the next generation by something which remains unchanged in successive generations of an organism – we now call this ‘something’ genes.
• Realized that traits could skip a generation – seemingly lost traits could appear again in another generation – he called these recessive traits.
• Identified recessive and dominant traits which pass from parents to offspring.
• Established, momentously, that traits pass from parents to their offspring in a mathematically predictable way.
Mendel’s work only made a big impact in 1900, 16 years after his death, and 34 years after he first published it.