<human>:  Who was the first person to genetically engineer a living organism?
<bot>: That would be Gregor Mendel. He was a monk who lived in the 19th century. He was a botanist and a geneticist. He was the first person to discover the laws of inheritance. He studied the traits of pea plants and discovered that they were determined by the combination of two genes. He also discovered that traits were inherited from parents to offspring.