Austrian botanist Erich von Tschermak-Seysenegg was an important plant geneticist who applied Gregor Mendel's laws of heredity to develop several new disease-resistant crops, including wheat-rye and oat hybrids. Tschermak has also been credited, along with two other botanists, with the discovery in 1900 of missing work done by Mendel. Mendel's work in plant breeding was neither appreciated nor even understood by the scientific community until the rediscovery of his findings and the independent validation of those findings by Tschermak and the two other scientists.

Erich von Tschermak-Seysenegg was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1871, and received his doctorate from the University of Halle, Germany, in 1896. Tschermak accepted a teaching position in Vienna at the Academy of Agriculture in 1901, and became professor there five years later, in 1906.

Prior to joining the staff at the Academy of Agriculture in Vienna, Tschermak conducted breeding experiments with garden peas at the Botanical Garden of...