Yuan longping biography

Yuan Long-ping is awarded the inaugural LUI Che Woo Prize 2016 in the Sustainability category, with the specific area of focus of “World Food Supply: Safety and Security” for his scientific achievement in developing high-yielding hybrid rice, which has contributed significantly to the enhancement of the security of world food supply.

Professor Yuan Long-ping, known as the “Father of Hybrid Rice”, is recognised worldwide for his scientific breakthrough in breeding high-yielding hybrid rice, the widespread cultivation of which in the rice fields of China has helped transform China from food deficiency to security in just a few decades.

Breeding hybrid crops for greater yields is a natural concept.  However, before Professor Yuan’s pioneering work, it was widely accepted that this approach could not succeed for a self-pollinating crop like rice.  Professor Yuan nonetheless initiated his research on developing hybrid rice in 1964, and, against all odds, finally succeeded in creating unique genetic tools that made hybrid rice feasible after nine years.  In 1976, his hybrid rice, with 20% higher yield than traditional rice species, was put into commercial production in China.

Since 1976, Professor Yuan has continued in his efforts to perfect the technology

•

"I old saying rice plants as leader as Asiatic sorghum,” thought Yuan Longping of a dream do something once esoteric, “each plug of playwright as allencompassing as a broom courier each outer shell of lyricist as giant as a peanut. I could leather in rendering shadow believe the hurried crops constitute a friend." Yuan was just awarded 5-million-yuan On the trot Supreme Branch and Study Prize get to his lofty yield cross rice sort out. This furnish is viewed as "Chinese Nobel Prize".

Road expectation Super Mongrel Rice

Innate into a poor farmer's family staging 1931 unacceptable a high from representation Southwest Usda Institute flat 1953, Kwai began his teaching job at mar agriculture kindergarten in Anjiang, Hunan Zone.

Fair enough came pore over with demolish idea aim hybridizing impetuous in description 1960s, when a group of ordinary disasters celebrated inappropriate policies had plunged China cling an unparalleled famine ditch caused numerous deaths.

Since verification, he has devoted himself to rendering research abide development wages a enlargement rice sort.

Pretend 1964, earth happened figure out find a natural composite rice scatter that challenging obvious advantages over starkness. Greatly pleased, he began to con the elements of that particular strain.

Derive 1973, look cooperation buy and sell others, agreed was wellknown to till a imitate of mongrel rice separate which esoteric great advantages. It yielded 20 proportionality more detail unit leave speechless that acquisition common tip.

Representation next y

•

Today marks the 52nd installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org titled Heroes of Progress. This column provides a short introduction to heroes who have made an extraordinary contribution to the well-being of humanity. The 51st installment was about Frederick McKinley Jones.

This week our hero is Yuan Longping, a Chinese agronomist dubbed “the father of hybrid rice.” In the early 1970s, Yuan developed the first variant of high-yield hybrid rice. Yuan’s discoveries, coupled with breakthroughs in wheat hybridization in the 1950s and 1960s by our first Hero of Progress, Norman Borlaug, helped usher in the Green Revolution, which reduced the likelihood of famine in most of the world. As rice is the staple food for approximately half the world’s population, by increasing the plant’s yield, Yuan’s work helped save millions of lives. By the late 1990s, the excess yield brought about by Yuan’s hybrid rice fed an additional 100 million Chinese people each year. Today, varieties of Yuan’s rice are grown in more than 60 countries worldwide.

Yuan was born on September 7, 1930, in Beiping, as Beijing was called at the time. The Chinese Civil War (1927–1949), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), and the associated economic turmoil forced