From Gregor Mendel to Medical Genetics

Extract

While I receive, with great joy and pride, the honorary degree of this University, commemorative celebrations to honor the Bohemian scientist Gregor Mendel are being held in the Czechoslovakian town of Brno.

One hundred years ago, Gregor Mendel announced his discoveries concerning the hybridization of “pisum sativum”, and opened to science the way to understand the principles underlying modern Genetics. I feel it my duty to recall with admiring devotion this great man, whose name is just as much connected with Biology, as Galileo Galilei's name is linked to Physics. All the more so, because the honorary degree conferred on me by the President and the Professors of Villanova University is a doctorate in Natural Sciences.

Two other reasons prompt me to recall the work of Mendel. One is that Gregor Mendel was an Augustinian monk, and such an exemplary one indeed, that he directed the Brno Monastery as Abbot from the forty-sixth year of his life to his death. In a personal letter addressed to the Augustinian General, Father Luciano Rubio, on the twentieth February of this year, Pope Paul the Sixth stressed the significance of the fact that the Augustinian Order had given to the Church and to Science such an eminent man. Now, there is no better place to recall the religious gifts and the scientific genius of Gregor Mendel than your University, founded and directed by Augustinian Fathers.