Harwood J
Centre for the History of Science, Technology & Medicine, University of Manchester, Mathematics Tower, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
C R Acad Sci III. 2000 Dec;323(12):1061-7. doi: 10.1016/s0764-4469(00)01258-0.
Why was Mendelism rediscovered? One way in which historians have addressed this issue is to look at wider trends in research during the 1890s of which the rediscoverers were part. Quite a lot is known about one such research tradition, namely the attempts to resolve the question of evolutionary mechanism through the use of varietal crosses. But another relevant research tradition is still largely unknown: the work of commercial breeders, several of whom were using hybridisation by the 1890s. In this paper I begin by looking at Tschermak's initial career, the sequence of events by which he came upon Mendel's work, and why he was excited by what he read. Then I place Tschermak's early work in the context of commercial plant-breeding in German-speaking Europe toward the end of the 19th century. Finally I look again at the question of Tschermak's somewhat ambivalent relationship to Mendelism after 1900. I argue that his initial misunderstanding of the concept of segregation was due to the fact that he approached Mendel's work with the perspective of a breeder rather than that of a geneticist.
为什么孟德尔遗传学说会被重新发现？历史学家探讨这个问题的一种方式是审视19世纪90年代的更广泛研究趋势，重新发现者也是其中一部分。对于一种这样的研究传统，我们了解颇多，即通过品种杂交来解决进化机制问题的尝试。但另一个相关的研究传统在很大程度上仍不为人所知：商业育种者的工作，其中有几位在19世纪90年代就已在使用杂交技术。在本文中，我首先考察切尔马克的早期职业生涯、他接触孟德尔著作的事件顺序，以及他对所读内容感到兴奋的原因。然后我将切尔马克的早期工作置于19世纪末德语欧洲商业植物育种的背景中。最后，我再次审视1900年后切尔马克与孟德尔遗传学说之间有点矛盾的关系问题。我认为，他最初对分离概念的误解是因为他是以育种者而非遗传学家的视角来接触孟德尔著作的。
