To commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, a group of scientists decided to dig up his body and sequence his DNA.
ARI SHAPIRO: We’re almost done with 2022, a year that marked the bicentennial of Gregor Mendel’s birth. He’s known as the father of genetics because his experiments with pea plants established the basic rules of heredity. And to commemorate the 200 years since Mendel’s birth, some researchers decided to dig him up and analyze his genes. NPR’s Nell Greenfieldboyce explains.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Local museum curators let them swab Mendel’s microscope, his glasses, his papers. Inside one of his favorite books on astronomy, the researchers found a hair. By looking at DNA from all that and comparing it to DNA in the skeleton, they felt certain that they’d found Mendel’s body. They sequenced all of his genes and found genetic variants linked to diabetes, heart problems, kidney disease. Geneticist Daniel Fairbanks, who’s written a book on Mendel, says one of his variants was particularly intriguing.
DANIEL FAIRBANKS: He suffered throughout his life from some sort of either psychological or neurological disorder that caused him to have very severe nervous breakdowns.
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GREENFIELDBOYCE: And his DNA shows a variant in a gene linked to epilepsy and other neurological issues.
