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 Heredity

Heredity
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 6 to 8
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   7.52

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    hemophilia, cystic, fibrosis, Gregor, hybrid, lobe, observable, red-headed, greatly, tendency, basis, inherit, dominant, offspring, exposure, heredity
     content words:    Gregor Mendel

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Heredity
By Cindy Grigg 		  
1     What makes children look like their parents? Sometimes people who are related look very much alike. For example, parents who are tall and red-headed will have children who are tall and red-headed. It's no accident.
 
2     Heredity is the process by which parents pass characteristics or traits on to their children. Traits that are passed from parents to children include eye color, hair color, and body build. Unfortunately, another trait that can be passed on is the tendency to get certain diseases or disorders. Some examples of these are hemophilia, which is a blood-clotting disorder, and cystic fibrosis, a breathing disorder. The tendency to get certain cancers also can be inherited.
 
3     Genes are segments of DNA that carry instructions for the traits of an offspring. Offspring are the children of two parent organisms. These organisms may be people, animals, plants, or insects. Remember, when we talk of heredity, it's true of plants and all these other organisms as well as people.
 
4     Gregor Mendel is often called the "Father of Genetics." Mendel was a monk who lived in the 1800's in Austria. He was the first person to trace the characteristics of successive generations of a living thing. Mendel was not a scientist, but he taught high-school science at the monastery. He was interested in nature and keenly observed the world around him.
 
5     In 1865 he published a paper describing experiments he did with garden pea plants. He noticed that certain traits in the parent plants could be predicted to occur in a certain percentage of the offspring. Traits like plant height, blossom color, color of peas, and whether the peas were wrinkled or smooth appeared to be passed down from the parent plant to the offspring. Mendel did not know about DNA or chromosomes, and he could not explain how these traits were passed down. His work was mostly ignored for many years. Mendel's work became the basis for the field of genetics, the study of heredity.

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