A Poem About The Father Of Modern Genetics

Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk and farmer who studied variations in over 5,000 pea plants between 1856 and 1863 that became the basis of the rules of heredity and inheritance in genetics.  In ninth grade biology class, I wrote a silly poem about him called A Monk And His PeaI’ve decided to share it here:

Genes are a unit of hereditary material
If you had none, you wouldn't be real
I'm going to talk about a man named Gregor Mendel
I'm sure his favorite soup had nothing that wasn't lentil
Many people did not know, and could not see
That his best discoveries came from the pea
He was a monk in Austria who looked at them by trait
He found out that peas didn't just decorate his plate
His discoveries were at the same time as Darwin's evolution
But nobody cared about his "factored" solution
He did it with class; he did it with style
But his discoveries weren't noted for a very long while
He made it as easy as cans and their lids
He made a generation of completely hybrids
How did he do it when he wasn't so sure?
He was completely positive that his plants were pure
He treated them with care as if they were his son
And then he called them the generation of F1
After this, he crossed them all
He ended up with 1/4 short and 3/4 tall
He put all this together to see what they could do
He then called them the generation of F2
After seeing those of the F2 Generation,
He was able to state a law called the law of segregation
While the other monks sat around being lazy,
They looked at poor Mendel and thought he was crazy
They thought he had trouble putting on his pants
How could he state things as the law of dominance?
When Mendel's papers were finally found,
It was too late, he was six feet in the ground
In the early 1900's WS Sutton appeared
An American graduate, a man to be feared
When at last this man entered the scene,
What Mendel called a factor, scientists called a gene
Gregor Mendel set the basis as not only I can see
Genetics actually started with a monk and his pea.

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