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Czechia: Gregor Mendel's Peas and the Birth of Genetics

Czechia: Gregor Mendel's Peas and the Birth of Genetics

Episode 160 Published 3 weeks, 5 days ago
Description

Why did a monk in a Moravian monastery spend eight years counting 30,000 pea plants — and how did the number three to one unlock the secret of heredity that Charles Darwin couldn't solve? Why did Gregor Mendel publish one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century to almost complete silence, only for his paper to be rediscovered thirty-four years later by three scientists who had all independently reached the same conclusion? And how did the statistician who accused him of fraud turn out to have made the statistical error himself?

Join John and Patrick as they tell the story of Czechia and the pea — the monastery garden, the number that changed biology, and the 145-year arc from Mendel's first cross-pollination to the Human Genome Project...

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