Mendel's work was rediscovered 16 years after his death. Gregor Mendel died on 6 January 1884, and scientists independently revived and verified his inheritance research in 1900.
Mendel had presented his pea-hybridization research in Brno in 1865 and published it in 1866, but the paper attracted little attention. For decades, many biologists favored blending inheritance, the idea that parental traits simply mix together. Mendel's concept of discrete hereditary factors was therefore easy for the scientific community to overlook.
Around 1900, Hugo de Vries and Carl Correns independently duplicated important parts of Mendel's work and rediscovered his paper. Erich von Tschermak was also initially credited, although later accounts question whether he fully understood Mendel's laws. The rediscovery is often described as occurring 16 years after Mendel's death, using the simple calendar difference between 1884 and 1900. It was this renewed attention—not a new experiment by Mendel—that helped establish genetics as a modern scientific discipline.