Most people know that Gregor Mendel, the Moravian monk who patiently grew his peas in a monastery garden, shaped our understanding of inheritance. But people might not know that Mendel's work was ignored in his own lifetime, even though it contained answers to the most pressing questions raised by Charles Darwin's revolutionary book, ON ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES, published only a few years earlier. Mendel's single chance of recognition failed utterly, and he died a lonely and disappointed man. Thirty-five years later, his work was rescued from obscurity in a single season, the spring of 1900, when three scientists from three different countries nearly simultaneously dusted off Mendel's groundbreaking paper and finally recognized its profound significance. The perplexing silence that greeted Mendel's discovery and his ultimate canonization as the father of genetics make up a tale of intrigue, jealousy, and a healthy dose of bad timing. Telling the story as it has never been told before, Robin Henig crafts a suspenseful, elegant, and richly detailed narrative that fully evokes Mendel's life and work and the fate of his ideas as they made their perilous way toward the light of day. THE MONK IN THE GARDEN is a literary tour de force about a little-known chapter in the history of science, and it brings us back to the birth of genetics - a field that continues to challenge the way we think about life itself.

PROLOGUE Spring 1900 The blue locomotive of the Great Eastern Railway streaked through the countryside of Cambridgeshire. To a farmer nearby, the trains cars was a rumble of teak and steel plowing through his fields, where seedlings of barley, wheat, and oats etched their own green tracks in the springtime loam. It was early May in 1900, and the earth, like the new century itself, pulsed with possibilities.Among the trains passengers was William Bateson, a don at St. Johns College, Cambridge. Bateson, who was a zoologist, was stoop- shouldered and large. His tweed vest strained at the buttons, his handlebar mustache gleamed - only his droopy eyes saved him from looking self-satisfied or smug. He had just turned forty, and was one of Britains chief combatants in the controversy over evolution and the theory of natural selection, still the source of strident debate more than forty years after Charles Darwin first proposed it.When Bateson boarded in Cambridge, he had no idea that in the next sixty minutes he would read a paper that would change the course not only of his own career, but of mankinds understanding of its place in the great cacophony of nature.Out the windows of Batesons velvet-and-leather compartment were mazes of hedgerows to the left, a pretty little river to the right. A tan stucco pub, looming beyond a hillock just past Harlowtown, marked roughly the halfway point on the familiar trip from Cambridge to London. But, according to the legend that has persisted for a full century, Bateson spent most of that train ride immersed in an old article from a small journal out of Austria. He was not gazing idly at the scenery.The article, written by an obscure Moravian monk named Gregor Mendel, described the elegant botanical experiments Mendel conducted in a modest monastery garden in the old Hapsburg empire of Austria. Mendel had painstakingly crossed and back-crossed pollen and egg cells from the common pea plant to reach a better understanding of inheritance. After working on peas and other plant species for seven long years, he recorded and analyzed his findings in a two-part lecture delivered in 1865. That lecture was published as a forty-four-page journal article - and then was all but ignored for the rest of Mendels life.What brought Bateson to that journal article on the morning of May 8, 1900 was the work of three other scientists, one of them the subject of his lecture that very afternoon. All three had cited Mendels forgotten paper almost simultaneously in their own separate publications. Uncannily, like a field of oat stalks that somehow know to erupt in unison, all three articles had appeared within two months of each other, during the same strange spring of 1900.As he read, Bateson realized that what he was trying to do in his own experiments was almost precisely what Mendel had already done thirty- five years before. He was both shocked and elated. As his wife put it, using a metaphor that prettil

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Excerpted from The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics by Robin Marantz Henig
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