Review

For many Americans, Gregor Mendel is at best little more than a cartoon character who occupied a page or two of a high school biology textbook. He is known as a retiring, chubby monk who raised peas and kept track of the smooth and wrinkled ones. In the process he happened upon some fundamental laws of inheritance, an accomplishment no one noticed until many years later.

So much for the father of genetics.

Science historians have argued for decades over Mendel's place in science, but those clashes have been confined mostly to the back streets of academia. Until recently, most people paid little attention to the broad field of genetics, much less to an Augustinian monk who died in relative obscurity in 1884.

With the human genome now mapped and the popular press filled with stories of genes and clones, it seems time to go back and look at Mendel and his work - to turn the cartoon into a person. Robin Marantz Henig does her best to do just that in her relatively brief, but highly readable, biography titled The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and found Genius of Gregor Mendel.

One does not envy Henig her task, for constructing even a relatively short biography of Mendel clearly involved a great deal of speculation, which Henig freely admits. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the monk who took over as abbot of the St. Thomas Monastery in Brünn (now Brno), Czechoslovakia after Mendel's death, burned all of Mendel's scientific and personal papers in a bonfire, "on the very spot where his greenhouse had once stood," Henig notes.

She points out that there is "so little, specific information about him - barely more than three short published papers, seven letters to a botanist in Munich, and a brief autobiography written when he was 28 years old. Almost nothing exists that places Mendel in his garden, his monastery flat, his church, or his beloved orangery on any particular day."

So Henig steps gently into the role of fiction writer as she tries to construct a reasonable biography. "Though I have no way of knowing with certainty what our protagonist was doing or thinking at any particular time, I can tell his story as it most probably occurred, based on circumstantial evidence and the sifting through of possibilities."

Henig uses her imagination and best guesses to recreate key moments, and to bridge the many silent periods in Mendel's life. For the most part she does it well and unobtrusively. If this kind of fictional reality bothers you, however, then stay away from The Monk in the Garden.

Henig opens her account with a prologue set in 1900, 16 years after Mendel's death. She uses this perspective to begin to put Mendel's work in context, and it is context that is at the core of this biography. Without records, it is difficult to know exactly the depth of Mendel's understanding of his own work. He clearly knew he was making discoveries of importance as he worked out the dominant and recessive traits of his generations of peas, but did he realize he was lifting the veil to the nature of evolution and life?

When his early experiments revealed the inheritance patterns of color and surface texture of 203 peas, Henig writes, "Mendel took the first steps toward the foundation of modern genetics by demonstrating, at least if one reads between the lines, that he understood the difference between a plant's appearance and its underlying makeup. He did not have the vocabulary to explain it; that would not come along until nearly fifty years later, when scientists understood more about the cell, the nucleus and the gene. But he was nonetheless revealing the distinction between what we now call phenotype and genotype."

As Henig details Mendel's work in the 1850s, she delves deep enough into the science to satisfy biologists, but keeps the story moving with her well-thought-out structure and engaging writing style. Henig believes Mendel to be a genius of sorts, but finds him difficult to define.

"Science textbooks tend to present Mendel as a pioneer in the deductive scientific method . . . " she writes. "But despite the legends that have built up about what he was doing and thinking in his garden - things created in part by his rediscoverers and in part by Mendel himself - what took place was probably much muddier than that."

Mendel did his work, presented two brief talks about the patterns he had uncovered, sent out copies of his paper to a host of scientists, then sat and waited for the world to respond. It didn't. His work was largely ignored, mainly due to the ignorance of the science community of the time. Nobody, it seems, understood the implications of what the scientist-monk was offering.

A young French salesman who met Mendel recalled 60 years later - when Mendel had finally become famous - that "not a soul believed his experiments were anything more than a pastime, and his theories anything more than the maunderings of a harmless putterer."