Czech scientists Mendel and Wichterle

TEKSL - erasmus project, presentation of two Czech scientists

1. Czech Scientists Gregor Johann Mendel – founder of genetics Otto Wichterle – inventor of contact lenses Teaching: An effective key to self-learning This project is funded by European Union.

2. Gregor Johann Mendel Czech:  Řehoř Jan Mendel  20 July 1822 6 January 1884 Place of birth: Hynčice Fields: Genetics He gained posthumous recognition as the founder of the modern science of  gen e tics .

3. Place of birth Mendel was born in a German-speaking family in Hynčice village in Silesian part of Austrian Empire (today's Czech Republic). Our team comes from this area. Then he lived and worked in Brno where he discovered his inheritance laws.

4. J. G. Mendel was born in this house.

5. Studies His family lived and worked on a farm. During his childhood, Mendel worked as a gardener and studied beekeeping. Later, as a young man, he attended middle school in Opava . He studied practical and theoretical philosophy and physics at the Philosophical Institute of the University of Olomouc.  He also struggled financially to pay for his studies, and his sister gave him her dowry. Later he helped support her three sons, two of whom became doctors . He became a friar because it enabled him to obtain an education without having to pay for it himself. He was given the name  Gregor  ( Řehoř  in Czech) when he joined the Augustinian  friars.

6. Life In 1847, Gregor Mendel became an Augustinian friar. He worked and lived at his monastery of St. Thomas' Abbey in Brno, Moravia. In 1847-1851 he worked as a high school substitute teacher at his neighbourhood high school . In 1851, he was sent to the University of Vienna to study. His professor of physics was Christian Doppler. Mendel returned to his abbey in 1853 and taught Physics at his previous high school until 1867.

7. In 1856-1865, Johann Gregor Mendel started experimenting with pea plants which he grew in the monastery garden. He was cross-breeding his pea plants and discovered genetics.

8. Career In 1868, Mendel was elected abbot of his monastery. In 1864, he died at the age of 61 in Brno, Moravia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic) . After his death, the succeeding abbot burned all papers in Mendel's collection .

9. Genetic discoveries Farmers had known for centuries that crossbreeding of animals and plants could favour certain desirable features. Mendel's pea plant experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 established many of the rules of heredity, known as the laws of inheritance.

10. Mendel worked with seven characteristics of pea plants: plant height, pod shape and colour, seed shape and colour, and flower position and colour. With seed colour, he showed that when a yellow pea and a green pea were bred together their offspring plant was always yellow. However, in the next generation of plants, the green peas reappeared at a ratio of 3 : 1 . To explain this phenomenon, Mendel used the terms “recessive” and “dominant” in reference to certain features. (In the preceding example, green peas are recessive and yellow peas are dominant.) He published his work in 1866, demonstrating the actions of invisible “factors”—now called genes—in providing for visible features in predictable ways. The importance of Mendel's work was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century

11. The laws of  Mendelian inheritance

12. The laws of  Mendelian inheritance

13. Other experiments Mendel began his studies on heredity using mice . He was at St. Thomas's Abbey but his bishop did not like one of his friars studying animal sex, so Mendel switched to plants. Mendel also bred bees in a bee house that was built for him, using bee hives that he designed .   He studied  astronomy and  meteorology, founding the 'Austrian Meteorological Society' in 1865. The majority of his published works were related to meteorology .

14. Conclusion Gregor Mendel discovered genetics. He figured out from cross-breeding pea plants that offspring inherit two main genes from their parents. One comes from the mother and one from the father. If these two genes are different, the offspring takes on the stronger gene, and the other gene doesn’t have a result that is visible. Different feature s reappear in the offspring in every single possible combination.  Mendel’s work in creating the science of genetics was discovered six years after his death. The combination of Mendelian genetics with Darwin's theory of natural selection resulted in the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology.

15. Otto Wichterle  27 October 1913 18 August 1 998 Place of birth: Prostějov Fields: Chemistry He is best known for his invention of modern soft contact lenses and synthetic fibre Silon .

16. Career changed by WWII In 1939, Wichterle was teaching chemistry at the Czech chemical university and studying medicine to be able to work in biochemistry science. The WWII interrupted his scientific career. On 17 November 1939 , the Czech universities were closed by the German occupants. Nine students were executed and hundreds sent to concentration camps. Wichterle joined the research institute at Baťa´s works in Zlín in to avoid this danger. There he led the technical preparation of plastics, especially polyamide and caprolactam .

17. Silon fibre invention in 1941 In 1941, Wichterle's team invented the procedure to throw and spool polyamide thread. They made the first  Czechoslovak synthetic fibre  under the name  silon .   ( This invention came independently on the original American nylon procedure from 1938. ) The team hide their discovery from the German invaders. Wichterle was imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1942 . He was released after a few months .

18. After World War II ,   Wichterle returned to the Chemical university. He specialized in organic chemistry. He wrote an inorganic and an organic chemistry textbooks in Czech, German and Russian languages. In 1952 he was made the dean of the newly established Institute of Chemical Technology in Prague. He studied the synthesis of cross-linking gels. He wanted to find a material suitable for medicine. In 1953, he patented his new material pHEMA . He believed that pHEMA was suitable for making soft contact lenses. Chemistry + Medicine = Biochemistry

19. First eye lenses On Christmas afternoon 1961, Wichterle produced the first four hydrogel contact lenses in his kitchen. He used an apparatus built from his children´s building kit Merkur , a bicycle dynamo, and a bell transformer. He tried the lenses in his own eyes and they were comfortable. A few days later, he completed his patent application. Then he invented a new way of manufacturing the lenses using a centrifugal casting procedure.

20. Eye lenses production In year 1962 he built several new prototype machines using Merkur toys and he made 5 500 lenses. The new machines needed a stronger motor, he took it from his gramophone. The early experimental lenses were called Geltakt . Then the lenses were named Spofalens after the state enterprise SPOFA which manufactured them. In 1965  National Patent Development Corporation  (NPDC) bought the American rights to produce the lenses to manufacture them in the USA.

21. Civic courage In 1970, Wichterle was expelled again from his position in the institute, this time for signing "The Two Thousand Words" — a manifesto asking for the continuation of the democratization process beg a n in 1968 during the Prague Spring. Punishment by the regime included removing him from his executive positions and making his research more and more difficult mainly by cutting off contacts from abroad and limiting his teaching opportunities. Full recognition did not come until the Velvet Revolution in 1989.  The asteroid number 3899 was named after Wichterle in 1993. A high school in Ostrava in the Czech Republic was named after him on September 1, 2006.

22. Sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10396755 https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Wichterle