Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Third Anniversary of Chemo - Gregor Mendel - Google Doodle

 Today is the "official" third  anniversary of the end my chemo in 2008 - and 3.5 years from surgery.   To quote Galileo  - from the Italian - "E pur si muove"  ("And yet, it moves" -  in this case time).

I found peas on Google's home page this morning.    Here's what it looked like.
the "Google doodle" commemorates the birth of Gregor Mendel,  father of modern genetics.   Mendel did most of his work with pea plants and documented the patterns and statistics of traits he observed (phenotypes) based on their parental traits. From these observations, he inferred what is known now as the Laws of Mendelian Inheritance.  He observed that traits are not blends of parental ones but specific characteristics  (either there or not with specific frequencies).  He posited that factors for each trait are inherited from each parent but separately (segregation).  And that traits are not inherited as a group but  independently (independent assortment).   As the microscopic and molecular aspects of genetics where later elucidated,  the mechanisms for Mendel's laws became apparent.  We now know that many phenotypes are transmitted in much more complex ways (non-Mendelian inheritance).