The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code Read Online Free PDF Page A

historians have defended Mendel over the years or argued that he manipulated his data only unconsciously, since standards for recording data differed back then. (One sympathizer even invented, based on no evidence, an overzealous gardening assistant who knew what numbers Mendel wanted and furtively discarded plants to please his master.) Mendel’s originallab notes were burned after his death, so we can’t check if he cooked the books. Honestly, though, if Mendel did cheat, it’s almost more remarkable: it means he intuited the correct answer—the golden 3:1 ratio of genetics—before having any real proof. The purportedly fraudulent data may simply have been the monk’s way of tidying up the vagaries of real-world experiments, to make his data more convincing, so that others could see what he somehow knew by revelation.
    Regardless, no one in Mendel’s lifetime suspected he’d pulled a fast one—partly because no one was paying attention. He read a paper on pea heredity at a conference in 1865, and as one historian noted, “his audience dealt with him in the way that all audiences do when presented with more mathematics than they have a taste for: there was no discussion, and no questions were asked.” He almost shouldn’t have bothered, but Mendel published his results in 1866. Again, silence.
    Mendel kept working for a few years, but his chance to burnish his scientific reputation largely evaporated in 1868, when his monastery elected him abbot. Never having governed anything before, Mendel had a lot to learn, and the day-to-day headaches of running St. Thomas cut into his free time for horticulture. Moreover, the perks of being in charge, like rich foods and cigars (Mendel smoked up to twenty cigars per day and grew so stout that his resting pulse sometimes topped 120), slowed him down, limiting his enjoyment of the gardens and greenhouses. One later visitor did remember Abbot Mendel taking him on a stroll through the gardens and pointing out with delight the blossoms and ripe pears; but at the first mention of his own experiments in the garden, Mendel changed the subject, almost embarrassed. (Asked how he managed to grow nothing but tall pea plants, Mendel demurred: “It is just a little trick, but there is a long story connected with it, which would take too long to tell.”)
    Mendel’s scientific career also atrophied because he wastedan increasing number of hours squabbling about political issues, especially separation of church and state. (Although it’s not obvious from his scientific work, Mendel could be fiery—a contrast to the chill of Miescher.) Almost alone among his fellow Catholic abbots, Mendel supported liberal politics, but the liberals ruling Austria in 1874 double-crossed him and revoked the tax-exempt status of monasteries. The government demanded seventy-three hundred gulden per year from St. Thomas in payment, 10 percent of the monastery’s assessed value, and although Mendel, outraged and betrayed, paid some of the sum, he refused to pony up the rest. In response, the government seized property from St. Thomas’s farms. It even dispatched a sheriff to seize assets from inside St. Thomas itself. Mendel met his adversary in full clerical habit outside the front gate, where he stared him down and dared him to extract the key from his pocket. The sheriff left empty-handed.
    Overall, though, Mendel made little headway getting the new law repealed. He even turned into something of a crank, demanding interest for lost income and writing long letters to legislators on arcane points of ecclesiastical taxation. One lawyer sighed that Mendel was “full of suspicion, [seeing] himself surrounded by nothing but enemies, traitors, and intriguers.” The “Mendel affair” did make the erstwhile scientist famous, or notorious, in Vienna. It also convinced his successor at St. Thomas that Mendel’s papers should be burned when he died, to end the dispute and save face for the monastery. The notes