Short answers, pulled from the story.
Heredity is the biological inheritance process that passes traits from parents to offspring through DNA, a long polymer molecule incorporating four types of bases. This mechanism ensures continuity across generations by copying DNA before cell division so that each resulting cell inherits the sequence.
Theophrastus, Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Aeschylus held various ideas about heredity in Antiquity, often mistaking observation for mechanism. Aeschylus wrote in 458 BC proposing the male as the parent with the female serving merely as a nurse for the young life sown within her.
Gregor Mendel published his work on pea plants in 1865, but his work was not widely known until it was rediscovered in 1900. This rediscovery fundamentally changed the course of biology and established the foundation for the study of Mendelian traits.
Trofim Lysenko caused a backlash known as Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union when he emphasized Lamarckian ideas on the inheritance of acquired traits. This movement affected agricultural research and led to food shortages in the 1960s, seriously affecting the USSR.
The description of a mode of biological inheritance involves the number of involved loci, the chromosomes involved, and the correlation between genotype and phenotype. These categories include monogenetic inheritance involving a single locus, oligogenic inheritance involving few loci, and polygenetic inheritance involving many loci.