About the Festival

The Mutual Inspirations Festival (MIF) is an annual initiative spearheaded by the Embassy of the Czech Republic, focusing on the mutual inspirations between Czech and American cultures and featuring each year an extraordinary Czech personality who has greatly influenced and inspired others through his or her work.

I am honored to welcome you to the eighth annual Mutual Inspirations Festival, organized by the Embassy of the Czech Republic and its many partners and generously backed by our valued supporters.

This year, we celebrate the posthumously yet universally recognized father of modern-day genetics, Gregor Johann Mendel. This humble genius, who up to his death maintained that his results would one day be understood for their worth, was born and conducted his groundbreaking research on the same land he sowed and loved, today’s Czech Republic. His rules of heredity, referred to as Mendelian inheritance, are considered worldwide as seminal work for the foundation of genetics. Beyond his pioneering conclusions, Mendel is revered for his protracted years of meticulous and painstaking experimentation.

In highlighting Mendel’s scientific achievements via the Mutual Inspirations Festival 2017 – Gregor Mendel, we are proud to bring science alive and closer to the wider public audience at numerous prestigious venues around Washington through a variety of intellectual and cultural events, such as stimulating lectures on Mendel’s legacy and contemporary ethical issues and possibilities in modern genetics, a delightful musical garden series, interesting film screenings, enlightening exhibitions on the feats of Czech scientists, interactive 3D plant biology workshops for kids, and much more.

I truly hope that the festival inspires and educates new generations of Czech and American researchers and prodigies who will make their own colossal discoveries and contributions to science.