A Nobel laureate, the man who classified blood groups, and the monk in Brno who founded genetics.
Czech science has a particular character: quiet, practical and frequently uncredited abroad. Its most famous figure spent his life as a monk in a Moravian monastery garden and was ignored for thirty-five years after his death.
Gregor Mendel (1822–1884)
An Augustinian friar at St Thomas’s Abbey in Brno, Mendel crossed some 28,000 pea plants and worked out the basic laws of heredity. His 1866 paper was almost entirely ignored until rediscovered in 1900. He is now considered the founder of genetics. The abbey in Brno is a museum.
Jaroslav Heyrovský (1890–1967)
Won the 1959 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for polarography, an analytical method he invented in Prague in 1922. He remains the only Czech Nobel laureate in the sciences.
Jan Evangelista Purkyně (1787–1869)
A pioneer of histology whose name is attached to structures across the body — Purkinje cells in the cerebellum, Purkinje fibres in the heart. He also described the Purkinje effect in vision and coined the biological use of the word protoplasm.
Jan Janský (1873–1921)
Classified human blood into four groups in 1907, independently of Landsteiner and with the classification that became standard. Czech blood donation awards still carry his name.
Otto Wichterle (1913–1998)
Invented the soft contact lens, prototyped at home with a children’s construction kit after being dismissed from his institute for political reasons.
Where to see it
Der Nationales Technisches Museum in Prague covers Czech science and industry properly, and the Mendel Museum in Brno is worth the two-hour train ride for anyone with a biology background.
Häufig gestellte Fragen
Was Mendel Czech?
He was a German-speaking Moravian, born in what is now the Czech Republic and working in Brno his entire scientific life.
Has the Czech Republic won Nobel Prizes?
Jaroslav Heyrovský won for Chemistry in 1959. Jaroslav Seifert won the Literature prize in 1984.
Where is the Mendel Museum?
At the Augustinian abbey in Brno, on the site of the original garden.
Read more: the National Technical Museum, Czech inventions Und Prague and science.
Last reviewed in August 2026.
