The story of the monk who experimented with peas in his monastery has all the highs and lows of great fiction. Mendel was a man of nervous constitution (whenever he had to visit the sick and dying he was so overcome physically that he had to take to bed) who was determined to work out how traits are inherited. He spent seven years in the monastery garden experimenting on over 300,000 strains of plants. Determined to discover how species change, adapt and arise anew but essentially remain the same from generation to generation, he worked out that traits are inherited independently, that they come in pairs, one from each parent. Mendel presented a paper outlining his findings in 1865, just 6 years after Darwin's The Origins of Species came out. While Darwin's work provoked agitated debate, Mendel continued to labour away in silence in his garden and his work was completely ignored. Mendel sent his paper to fellow scientist Carl von Nageli who told Mendel that his work was incomplete and unconvincing. He encouraged Mendel to create hybrids from hawkweed which Naegeli knew was incredibly difficult to achieve as he had himself spent years working on them. Was he furious that a younger man had struck on something far more original than he could ever produce? Did he deliberately divert the monk After Mendel's death all his papers were burnt in a bonfire in the monastery. Was this routine housekeeping or the result of a fit of jealousy by a monk who succeeded him as abbot? Finally, in 1900, 35 years after it first appeared, Mendel's paper was found by the Cambridge scientist William Bateson. It became immediately apparent that Mendel was onto something extremely significant. Had Darwin known about his work many of the debates about the details of natural selection might have been resolved. This is a captivating book about a remarkable and neglected man who played an enormous role in our understanding of the mechanisms of life itself.

This acclaimed biography of 19th century scientist Gregor Mendel is “a fascinating tale of the strange twists and ironies of scientific progress” (Publishers Weekly). A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist In The Monk in the Garden, award-winning author Robin Marantz Henig vividly chronicles the birth of genetics, a field that continues to challenge the way we think about life itself. Tending to his pea plants in a monastery garden, the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel discovered the foundational principles of genetic inheritance. But Mendel’s work was ignored during his lifetime, even though it answered the most pressing questions raised by Charles Darwin's revolutionary book, On the Origin of Species. Thirty-five years after his death, Mendel’s work was saved from obscurity when three scientists from three different countries nearly simultaneously dusted off his groundbreaking paper and finally recognized its profound significance. From the perplexing silence that greeted his discovery to his ultimate canonization as the father of genetics, Henig presents a tale filled with intrigue, jealousy, and a healthy dose of bad timing. Though little is known about Mendel’s life, she "has done a remarkable job of fleshing out the myth with what few facts there are" (Washington Post Book World).

Pregnant with triplets, the father of her babies abandons sixteen-year-old Paula. Her family give her an ultimatum, have the babies terminated or leave home. All alone, Paula decides to keep the triplets and go through with the pregnancy. Although she is strong and smart nothing could prepare Paula when she loses one of the triplets at birth. Sixteen years later Paula is now married and has not only survived having twin daughters but she has thrived. But something keeps nagging at her in the background, will she ever get over the death of her son?Samantha Scott has a secret; it is eating away at her from the inside. Can she live with what she has done? A chance meeting with Paula in the caf� sets in motion the chance for Samantha to put right what she did sixteen years ago. God has forgiven her, but can she get forgiveness from Paula and forgive herself?The lives of two women collide, can forgiveness be found or is time running out and what is this great secret that Samantha carries?

Presents the life of the geneticist, discussing the poverty of his childhood, his struggle to get an education, his life as a monk, his discovery of the laws of genetics, and the rediscovery of his work thirty-five years after its publication.

“With this memoir by a ‘simple monk’ who spent 33 years in prisons and labor camps for resisting the Chinese, a rare Tibetan voice is heard.” —The New York Times Book Review Palden Gyatso was born in a Tibetan village in 1933 and became an ordained Buddhist monk at eighteen—just as Tibet was in the midst of political upheaval. When Communist China invaded Tibet in 1950, it embarked on a program of “reform” that would eventually affect all of Tibet’s citizens and nearly decimate its ancient culture. In 1967, the Chinese destroyed monasteries across Tibet and forced thousands of monks into labor camps and prisons. Gyatso spent the next twenty-five years of his life enduring interrogation and torture simply for the strength of his beliefs. Palden Gyatso’s story bears witness to the resilience of the human spirit, and to the strength of Tibet’s proud civilization, faced with cultural genocide. “To readers of this memoir, however untraveled, Tibet will never again seem remote or unfamiliar. . . . Gyatso reminds us that the language of suffering is universal.” —Library Journal “Has the ring of undeniable truth. . . . Palden Gyatso’s clear-sighted eloquence (in Tsering Shakya’s fluent translation) makes his tale even more engrossing.” —San Francisco Chronicle

The Foundations of Genetics describes the historical development of genetics with emphasis on the contributions to advancing genetical knowledge and the various applications of genetics. The book reviews the work of Gregor Mendel, his Law of Segregation, and of Ernst Haeckel who suggested that the nucleus is that part of the cell that is responsible for heredity. The text also describes the studies of W. Johannsen on "pure lines," and his introduction of the terms gene, genotype, and phenotype. The book explains the theory of the gene and the notion that hereditary particles are borne by the chromosomes (Sutton-Boveri hypothesis). Of the constituent parts of the nucleus only the chromatin material divides at mitosis and segregates during maturation. Following studies confirm that the chromatin material, present in the form of chromosomes with a constant and characteristic number and appearance for each species, is indeed the hereditary material. The book describes how Muller in 1927, showed that high precision energy radiation is the external cause to mutation in the gene itself if one allele can mutate without affecting its partner. The superstructure of genetics built upon the foundations of Mendelism has many applications including cytogenetics, polyploidy, human genetics, eugenics, plant breeding, radiation genetics, and the evolution theory. The book can be useful to academicians and investigators in the fields of genetics such as biochemical, biometrical, microbial, and pharmacogenetics. Students in agriculture, anthropology, botany, medicine, sociology, veterinary medicine, and zoology should add this text to their list of primary reading materials.