Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk who is considered the father of genetics. Through experiments breeding garden peas in the 1850s, he discovered the basic principles of heredity, including that genes come in pairs and can be dominant or recessive. His work was largely ignored during his lifetime but rediscovered in the early 1900s, forming the basis of modern genetics. Mendel used true-breeding pea plants and recorded inheritance patterns over multiple generations to develop the laws of segregation and independent assortment, which describe how genes are passed from parents to offspring.