Gregor Johann Mendel was born on July 22, 1822 to peasant parents in a small agrarian town in Czechoslovakia. His work with the pea plant changed the world of science forever.
He found that the plants' respective offspring retained the essential traits of the parents, and therefore were not influenced by the environment. This simple test gave birth to the idea of heredity.
Google marks the 189th birthday of Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, whose vital discoveries about inheritance patterns in pea plants weren't fully acknowledged until after his death in 1884. Feeling overlooked in his final years, he famously promised himself that meine Zeit wird schon kommen ("my time will yet come").