A Monk and Two Peas by Robin Marantz Henig, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 拢14.99, ISBN 0297643657 (The Monk in the Garden in the US)
RADICAL ideas sometimes need champions to survive the hurly-burly of science. Darwin had his bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, to defend the theory of evolution. And Gregor Mendel had biologist William Bateson to fight his corner.
Of all the advances made in biology in the past century, nothing has had more impact on our lives than genetics. Mendel鈥檚 work was rediscovered in 1900, the structure of DNA was revealed about 50 years later, and as the century came to a close we had already read the complete genetic code of a flu virus and a worm. Soon we will have charted the entire genetic sequence of complex organisms, from plants to Homo sapiens.
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If the genetic revolution was a 20th-century phenomenon, its roots lie in a quiet monastery garden full of pea plants in Brno, now in the Czech Republic. There, Mendel worked for years cross breeding and counting variations. He published his results in 1866. Much has been written about Mendel as the forgotten hero, but A Monk and Two Peas paints a different portrait. The new insights Robin Marantz Henig offers into his character reveal him as a 鈥渇lawed but brilliant human being鈥�, and a genius in the mould of Edison-1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.
Unfortunately, as Henig shows us, it is hard to get close to Mendel. His correspondence and other personal papers were burned after his death. There remain just 鈥渢hree short published papers, seven letters to a botanist in Munich and a brief autobiography written when he was 28 years old鈥�, which covers his life before he began genetic research. Henig weaves an exploration of Mendel鈥檚 life out of these meagre remains.
Sometimes she extrapolates too much from these limited original sources, working too hard to add a touch of drama. But along the way Henig shows that there is much to be learned about Mendel that has not penetrated the consciousness of most biologists, and still less the general public. Few will have heard of Mendel鈥檚 scientific influences in Vienna, the support he received from Abbot Napp or his struggles with depression. Fewer still will know of the difficulties he suffered in attempting to repeat his original work with a much more intractable genus, Hieracium.. Its seeds are produced by sexual reproduction, so the kind of cross-breeding Mendel wanted to investigate did not occur.
Along the way, academics will empathise with Mendel鈥檚 鈥渓oss to administration鈥� when he was elected abbot in 1868. Everyone will find it poignant that reprints of Mendel鈥檚 papers languished unread in the libraries of Darwin and Kerner von Marlaun.
But despite Henig鈥檚 hard work, she still leaves us in the dark about so much that we would like to understand. Was Mendel simply lucky in choosing to examine traits that are predominantly borne on different chromosomes in the pea? Or did his experience and observations allow him to know intuitively that these were the kinds of features that would provide the cleanest results? We can never know the answer to the key question of what exactly Mendel had set out to do.
Happily, the rediscovery of Mendel鈥檚 work and the early development of genetics have much more meat to them. The facts are abundant and the sources more diverse. For me, this was the most enjoyable part of Henig鈥檚 book. Vivid personalities and clear conflict move the story briskly along. Well-known scientists who knew that they were onto something important played out the debates about heredity of characteristics in public.
Henig shows the roles that Hugo De Vries, Karl Correns and Erich von Tschermak played in the resurrection of Mendel鈥檚 work. They had all independently begun to explore variation and heredity, and were taking pains to secure their own position in the exciting new science that Bateson christened 鈥済enetics鈥�. Bateson, of course, did more than just name the discipline: it was he who lionised the Moravian monk over the objections of De Vries.
Henig dismisses the notion that the quiet priest 鈥渇udged his data鈥�. Some have claimed that Mendel simply didn鈥檛 have enough space in his monastery garden to grow the number of plants that his results imply. Henig argues that the narrow strip of land called Mendel鈥檚 garden is not the plot where his peas grew. His garden had been larger and in a different place.
What A Monk and Two Peas does best is to flesh out the prehistory and early history of genetics in an accessible and engaging way. It also succeeds in portraying the people behind the momentous events, warts and all.