Search

Aleksandar Mikić was born in Pančevo, Serbia, on 9 January 1974, and died on 5 September 2021, Novi Sad, Serbia. He received BSc in 1998, MSc in 2008, and PhD in 2014 in Plant Genetics and Breeding at the University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Agriculture. He worked as Research Associate and annual legume breeder at the Institute of Field and Vegetable Crops in Novi Sad, Serbia, from 2000 to 2018. His fields of interest encompassed conventional and molecular genetics, genetic resources, breeding, agronomy, agroecology, and crop history of annual legumes. Dr. Mikić co-authored more than 350 journal papers, about 120 international conference papers, over 10 book chapters and one book. He has also authored more than 30 cultivars of annual legumes and various forage crops registered in Serbia and abroad. Aleksandar's scientific horizons were endless, including archaeobotany, linguistics, plant biology, breeding, and farmers communities.

The two lectures Gregor Mendel gave in the spring of 1865 to the Natural Science Society in Brno can be considered the ultimate origin of genetics. Here we reconstruct these lectures and their settings using digitized historical newspapers, and we compare these to Mendel's 1866-paper "Experiments on plant hybrids". The newspapers explained to their readers that Mendel used the term "Hybriden" in the sense of "Bastarden". Naturalists commonly used the latter term to describe hybrids between species in nature. Mendel's use of "Hybriden" and the avoidance of "Bastarden" in the 1866-paper and early letters to Nägeli regarding Pisum are particular. In English translations, both German words are translated as "hybrids" so that Mendel's differentiated use of words is no longer noticeable. We argue that with the use of "Hybriden" Mendel did not need to take a position on whether the Pisum parental forms were species or varieties, as Mendel considered these as extremes of a continuum. That Mendel probably started his pea crossings as a breeder may also have played a role; "Hybriden" was commonly used in horticulture. Mendel's use of "Hybriden" was unusual for the naturalists in the Natural Science Society, and newspaper reports indicate that this led to confusion. According to the Brünner Zeitung, legumes were not suitable for studies on hybridisation because such interspecific hybrids were rare in nature. However, in his 1866-article, Mendel explained that the garden pea was highly suitable for experimental hybridization due to its flower structure. In the Concluding Remarks of the 1866-article, Mendel showed that his findings were relevant for hybrids between wild species by reviewing the work of Gärtner and Kölreuter. We conclude that it is probable that this section was not part of the lectures and was added later to the paper to accommodate points raised in the discussion after the lectures.