The Austrian botanist Gregor Johann Mendel was a genius of the plodding, hardworking, single-minded sort - a genius for whom discovery was, as Thomas Edison put it, one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. He was not a playful, intuitive genius like Picasso. (The great painter once said, “I do not seek — I find,” an attitude that describes many of the men and women we now think of as geniuses.)
Mendel “toiled, almost obsessively, at what he did. But still he had that extra 1 percent, that inspiration that helped him see his results from a slightly different angle. It was this flash of insight that allowed Mendel to perform a feat of genius: to propose laws of inheritance that ultimately became the underpinning of the science of genetics” (Henig, 2001, p. 6).
According to Henig (2001) it was Mendel’s non-heroism that allowed him to do the patient, thorough work through which his genius emerged (p. 168). A science was named in his honor: Mendelian genetics. High-functioning autism/Asperger Syndrome would be highly useful in this kind of plodding work, and this chapter presents the evidence that Mendel displayed this condition.
Mendel made the first tentative step towards a concept that would not be fully elucidated for another 50 years: the difference between phenotype (the way something looks) and genotype (the particular combination of genes that explains those looks) (Henig, 2001).
Life History
Mendel was born on July 22, 1822, near Udrau, in Austrian Silesia. His father, a farmer, did some experimental work with grafts to create better fruits. Mendel entered the Augustinian cloister at Briinn, and was ordained a priest. Having studied science at Vienna, he returned to Briinn and later became abbot. He studied plant variation, heredity, and evolution in the monastery’s garden, particularly in pea plants. (It is interesting that many adults with autism work well in gardens; e.g., at Dunfirth in Ireland, people with autism live and work at activities such as organic vegetable growing that are intended to foster their growth and development.)
Mendel died at Briinn in January 1884, from Bright’s disease (inflammation of the kidneys). Later, he was heralded as the father of genetics. During his years of anonymity, the priest was fond of telling his friends, “My time will come.”
Work
According to Henig (2001), Mendel “observed that traits are inherited separately and that characteristics that seem to be lost in one generation may crop up again a generation or two later, never having been lost at all. He gave us a theoretical underpinning for this observation, too: he believed the traits passed from parent to offspring as discrete, individual units in a consistent, predictable, and mathematically precise manner” (p. 7). Sixty years after his death, a friend stated, “Not a soul believed his experiments were anything more than a pastime, and his theories anything more than the maunderings of a harmless putterer” (Henig, 2001, p. 164). During the winter, Mendel spent as much time as he could in the monastery library, doing meticulous work. His relationship to peas was probably similar to that of other persons with autism to numbers.
Social Behavior
Mendel was essentially homebound for his first forty years. In one photograph he is “standing in the precise middle of the group and looking off somewhere past the photographer's left shoulder” — he stands “erect and alone” (Henig, 2001, p. 121).
Mendel was a very shy person, with major peer and relationship problems. He had a naturally reticent personality: a friendly reserve with an underlying privacy. He was unable to do the most basic work that priests were required to do and was not in good health. He took to bed with a mysterious illness. Abbot Napp, the head of the monastery, stated that he was “seized by an unconquerable timidity when he has to visit a sick-bed or to see anyone ill or in pain. Indeed, this infirmity of his has made him dangerously ill” (Henig, 2001, p. 37).
When trying to do some teaching, he panicked and performed poorly at a teaching assessment that involved both an oral and a written examination. Professor Kanner, who examined his geological essay, described it as arid, obscure, and hazy, his thinking as erroneous, and his writing style as hyperbolic and inappropriate. Clearly Mendel had been an autodidact. Six years later he again tried to pass the certificate examination but panicked again and failed. According to Henig (2001), he was relegated for the rest of his career to the rank of uncertified substitute teacher.
Narrow Interests/Obsessiveness
As a boy Mendel was a disappointment to his father because of his reluctance to get out of bed. Mendel was attracted to book learning and joined the local monks.
Henig (2001) referred to a “one-track, simmering genius that had a chance to explode only years later, when the twin stars of intuition and accident were momentarily aligned in Mendel’s favor, providing him an insight into the mystery of inheritance that few but he were prepared to understand” (p. 22). Henig thought that as a young man Mendel was probably eager, driven, and scientifically voracious. Nevertheless, he had interests other than experimental science: He became the official “weather watcher” for the city of Briinn and recorded meteorological readings every day. The fame that he longed for would come to him in his lifetime primarily as a local meteorologist. He was a skilled chess player (persons with autism are often interested in chess); he kept bees and gathered honey. He regarded his bees as his “dear little animals.”
According to Henig:
Mendel was also forever amusing himself with scientific and mathematical ideas that had nothing to do with plants. On the back of a draft of one of his dozens of church-tax missives, he scribbled lists that showed that, even in the midst of administrative tasks, he set himself new intellectual challenges. One of the most intriguing was a list of common surnames. Using several directories — the Military Year Book of 1877, the register of transporters, the register of bankers, a barristers’ year book — Mendel collected more than seven hundred names, which he arranged in different ways in an apparent attempt to spot some sort of pattern. First he placed them in alphabetical order, then he grouped them according to meaning. (2001, p. 165)
Mendel’s experimentation with peas was tedious work: In the autumn of 1857 alone, he had to shell, count, and sort by shape more than 7,000 peas, and that was just for one experiment, involving crosses between round and angular peas (Henig, 2001, p. 81). By the time he finished his work, seven years after he began, Mendel had conducted seven versions of this experiment, seven different monohybrid crosses, designed to look at plants that varied in only a single trait (shape first, then color, then height). By the time he had completed this succession of crosses, re-crosses, and backcrosses, he must have counted a total of more than 10,000 plants, 40,000 blossoms, and a staggering 300,000 peas. Virtually no one except a person with autism could do this.
Henig (2001) noted that Mendel applied his passion for counting almost indiscriminately to everything in his own little world. He counted not only peas but weather readings, students in his classes, and bottles of wine purchased for the monastery cellar. People with high-functioning autism are fascinated by numbers.
After Mendel became abbot of his monastery, he engaged in an obsessive letter-writing campaign against the new “monastery tax,” which he continued until his death.
Routines/Control
“Monastery life was a balm to Mendel. Its regularity provided ease and comfort to a man who had spent his first twenty-one years in a thicket of uncertainty” (Henig, 2001, p. 25).
The orangery became his favorite place in the monastery. This is reminiscent of Ludwig Wittgenstein writing his philosophy in the warm botanic gardens in Dublin. He furnished the orangery with “a game table for playing chess; an oak writing table; six rush-bottomed nut wood chairs; and a few paintings. In his last years, when as abbot he could use the monastery’s grandest rooms, he still spent his time in the orangery ... working through the mathematical, biological, and meteorological problems that vexed and intrigued him all the days of his life” (Henig, 2001, p. 65).
Language/Humor
Mendel, even to the end of his life, had a waggish and somewhat mischievous sense of humor, and “collected good jokes the way Darwin collected barnacles” (Henig, 2001, p. 163). He once upset the local bishop by saying, in what he thought was a whisper, that the bishop possessed “more fat than understanding.” He would “walk slowly among the plants, which he liked to call his ‘children’ to get a reaction from visitors who did not know about his gardening experiments. “Would you like to see my children?’ the priest would ask. Their startled and embarrassed faces were always good for a chuckle” (Henig, 2001, p. 116).
Anxiety/Depression
Mendel became paranoid later in his life, just like Isaac Newton, and was suspicious of everyone, even his fellow monks, whom he thought to be “nothing but enemies, traitors and intriguers” (Henig, 2001, p. 162).
Mode of Thought
Mendel became interested in combination theory, which describes the relationship among the objects in a group arranged in any predetermined way. Henig (2001) saw this belief in combination theory as a mark of Mendel’s genius: “Throughout history, some of the most creative minds have been those capable of maintaining two different mental constructs of the world simultaneously and applying the principles of one model to problems in the domain of the second” (p. 54).
The day he died, the local Natural Science Society heard a eulogy that referred to his “independent and special manner of reasoning” (Henig, 2001, p. 166).
Appearance
Henig (2001) quoted an acquaintance who described Mendel as “a man of medium height, broad-shouldered ... with a big head and a high forehead, his blue eyes twinkling in the friendliest fashion through his gold-rimmed glasses. Almost always he was dressed, not in priest robes, but in the plain clothes proper for a member of the Augustinian order acting as schoolmaster — tall hat; frock coat, usually rather too big for him; short trousers tucked into topboots.” His dress “bespoke his decorum and modesty; he was out in the world, but always a cleric” (p. 90). It is interesting that he is supposed to have had a big head: 50% of people with autism have big heads. This may be due to less pruning of cells early in life but may lead to a greater capacity to carry out mathematical calculations. When he walked, according to an acquaintance, he looked straight in front of him.
Conclusion
Mendel showed many of the criteria for Asperger Syndrome, particularly obsessiveness, social impairment, and love of routine. He also had the interest in counting, classifying, and mathematical calculation that is quite typical of the syndrome.
- Michael Fitzgerald, Former Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
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