SEX, IT SEEMS, is everywhere on television these days, even in the pea patch. That`s where WTTW-Ch. 11`s ”Nova,” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, finds Gregor Johann Mendel, a 19th-Century Austrian monk, working out his theory of heredity, keeping records on 13,000 experiments in selected breeding and tying little booties on mother-to-be peas after they, um, made love.
That was pretty dicey stuff a century ago, and much of ”The Garden of Inheritance: The Story of Gregor Mendel” has to do with sexual politics:
attempts by the church, state and scientific establishments to dissuade Mendel from his dream of becoming a Hugh Hefner of the garden.
Mendel struggled to combine his faith with his love of scientific inquiry. He had to cut through office politics, fight narrow-minded bureaucrats and duck police to reach his conclusions. Eventually, two decades after he died, he was acclaimed as the ”father of genetics,” a tribute to his independent thinking, as is this fine hour.