Czech birthplace of genetics seeks biotech future
Date: 2.8.2006
Yet it was here, 150 years ago, that the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel worked out the basic laws of inheritance by painstakingly cross-breeding thousands of pea plants.
His breakthrough was to show how many characteristics, such as the height of plants or the wrinkles in their seeds, were inherited in an all-or-nothing way as discrete particles or, in modern parlance, genes.
Mendel's ideas form the bedrock of modern biology. But his work went unrecognized in his own lifetime and Mendelian genetics was suppressed under Communism as a bourgeois heresy at odds with the idea that all people are created equal.
A statue erected in Mendel's honor in one of Brno's main squares was taken down by the Communists in 1950. It now stands in a shady corner of the abbey garden.
These days, however, the Czech Republic's second-largest city is lionizing the man known as the father of genetics.
A museum which opened at the abbey in 2002 has attracted more than 25,000 visitors and Professor Jan Slovak, head of strategic development at Masaryk University, believes Mendel's heritage can help make the region a hub of biotech research.
"Mendel's way of blending the sciences of mathematics and botany together is still alive in Brno and is reflected in our approach to clinical research," he told Reuters.
"We feel Brno is becoming a hotbed of development. It is not yet a very big one but it is dynamic."
To encourage the creation of new biotech businesses, Brno is building a new "Medipark" life science campus at Masaryk University, which is due for completion in 2008 at a cost of 200 million euros ($254 million).
The Czech Republic already has some 65 biotech firms, mainly around Brno and Prague, and the country has attracted a number of big drugmakers, who see it as a cheap, efficient place to do clinical trials and to manufacture biotech drugs and vaccines.
In March this year, the renowned U.S. Mayo Clinic also selected Brno's International Clinical Research Center for a unique U.S.-EU medical collaboration project.
A few years ago, biotechnology was virtually non-existent in eastern Europe. Today international business consultants Ernst & Young predict a promising biotech future for countries like the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, given their skilled workforces and relatively low costs.
GARDEN BLOOMS
For the abbey -- which only reopened in 1989 following the fall of Communism and has just three elderly monks in residence -- embracing science makes good business sense.
Many of its buildings are now rented out commercially and the Mendel Museum is an important link with the institution's long tradition of scientific learning.
Mendel was not the only monk interested in combining science with religion and his contemporaries included experts in mathematics, meteorology, agronomy and astronomy.
The museum named after him has a tiny budget and a staff of just four but deputy director Radek Vogel is pushing ahead with plans to restore Mendel's garden to some of its former glory.
Visitors can already view demonstration beds of plants displaying specific genetic traits outside the abbey refectory, constructed in the 18th century, where Mendel -- a farmer's son -- conducted his pea hybrid tests.
Those experiments started in 1856 and Mendel finally presented his seminal findings to Brno's local scientific society in 1865 -- although the importance of his discovery was not recognized by the wider world for another 35 years.
Later this year, Vogel aims to restore Mendel's beehives in a wooded, and still overgrown, section of the garden behind the abbey.
The abbey's main walled garden -- a pleasing green space of lawns, trees and a few modest flowerbeds a short walk from the center of old Brno -- may seem, at first sight, a very long way from cutting-edge science.
But for Professor John Parker, director of Cambridge University Botanic Garden in England, who helped with the restoration plans, its ties to modern research are very strong.
"Everything, right through to the human genome project, really depended on the model of scientific investigation that Mendel laid down all that time ago," he said. "He was the founding father of our modern understanding of genetics."
"Source":[ http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2006-07-12T023524Z_01_L03472852_RTRUKOC_0_US-SCIENCE-CZECH-MENDEL.xml&pageNumber=0&imageid=&cap=&sz=13&WTModLoc=NewsArt-C1-ArticlePage2]
