 It wasn’t until 1900 that the full force of Mendel’s observations became absorbed by the scientific community. That year, three different European botanists reported on the results of their own breeding experiments and linked their results back to Mendel’s work decades earlier. Mendel’s research, at this time, was characterized as revealing heredity to involve the transmission of discrete hereditary factors that obeyed fundamental principles—that organisms get one copy of each factor from each parent and, in turn, pass one copy on to their own offspring (the law of segregation), that the factors segregate independently of one another (the law of independent assortment), and that certain factors dominate other factors when it comes to expressing the trait associated with that factor (the law of dominance) (entry:  gene).  William Bateson, a biologist at the University of Cambridge at the time, was excited about the implications of Mendel’s work for theories of evolution; he recruited a number of young scientists—women in particular—to Cambridge to perform experiments showing that Mendel’s principles extended across the plant and animal kingdoms (Richmond 2001). He called this new discipline “genetics”, and “gene” became the term for the factor that was inherited (entry:  the genotype/phenotype distinction).