© Getty ImagesGregor Mendel, above, laid the foundations of modern genetics with his experiments on pea plants.
A long lost manuscript, one of the most important in the history of modern biology, has resurfaced as part of a dispute over its ownership.
The manuscript is the account by Gregor Mendel of the pea-breeding experiments from which he deduced the laws of heredity and laid the foundations of modern genetics.
Mendel read his paper in 1865 at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brünn. He was then an Augustinian monk, later the abbot, in the Abbey of St. Thomas in Brünn, now Brno in the Czech Republic.
The paper was published the next year in the Brünn Natural History Society's journal, but Mendel's work was largely ignored during his lifetime. It was only in 1900, 16 years after his death, that other researchers rediscovered Mendel's laws and realized that he had anticipated them.