Book Creator | Yuan Longping - "Father of Hybrid Rice"

Overview

Yuan Longping was born on Sept. 7, 1930, in Beijing — or Beiping, as it was then called — into a family that was unusually well-educated for that time. And passed away on May. 22nd, 2021.

Yuan Longping was a Chinese agronomist and member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering known for developing the first hybrid rice varieties in the 1970s, part of the Green Revolution in agriculture. For his contributions, Yuan is known as the "Father of Hybrid Rice".

Early Life

Yuan Longping was born on Sept. 7, 1930, in Beijing — or Beiping, as it was then called — into a family that was unusually well-educated for that time. His mother, Hua Jing, taught English and his father, Xinglie Yuan, was a schoolteacher who later became a railroad official.

Mr. Yuan often cited the example set by his mother. “She was an educated woman at a time when they were uncommon,” he said in a memoir published in 2010. “From early on I came under her uplifting influence.”

Mr. Yuan was the second of six siblings. His life and schooling were unsettled as war, the Japanese invasion and economic upheaval forced the family to move around southern China. But he said his parents insisted that their children receive a solid education. He entered college in 1949, just as the Chinese Communist Party was consolidating its control of the country, and chose to specialize in agronomy in a school in the southwest.

His initial inspiration for choosing agricultural science — despite not having a rural background, and the misgivings of his parents — came partly from visiting a farm for a school excursion, and partly from an idyllic scene in Charlie Chaplin’s film “Modern Times,” in which the Little Tramp savors grapes and fresh milk at the doorstep of his home. “As I grew older, the desire became stronger, and agronomy became my life’s vocation,” he wrote in his memoir.

Mr. Yuan chose to specialize in crop genetics at a time when the subject was an ideological minefield in China.

Mao Zedong had embraced the doctrines of Soviet scientists who rejected modern genetics and maintained that genes could be directly rewired by altering environmental conditions, such as the temperature. They claimed this would open the way to dramatic rises in crop yields.

After graduating in 1953, Mr. Yuan took a job as a teacher in an agricultural college in Hunan Province, keeping up his interest in crop genetics. His commitment to the field took on greater urgency from the late 1950s, when Mao’s so-called Great Leap Forward — his frenzied effort to collectivize agriculture and jump-start steel production — plunged China into the worst famine of modern times, killing tens of millions. Mr. Yuan said he saw the bodies of at least five people who had died of starvation by the roadside or in fields.

“Famished, you would eat whatever there was to eat, even grass roots and tree bark,” Mr. Yuan recalled in his memoir. “At that time I became even more determined to solve the problem of how to increase food production so that ordinary people would not starve.” Mr. Yuan soon settled on researching rice, the staple food for many Chinese people, searching for hybrid varieties that could boost yields and traveling to Beijing to immerse himself in scientific journals that were unavailable in his small college. He plowed on with his research even as the Cultural Revolution threw China into deadly political infighting.

By 1970, Mr. Yuan was growing frustrated with his halting progress in creating more productive rice crops. He hit upon a shift in strategy: search for wild varieties across remote areas of China for more promising genetic material. A breakthrough came when Mr. Yuan’s team came upon a stretch of wild rice near a rail line on Hainan Island in southernmost China. The following year, Mr. Yuan separately published a research paper in China that explained how genetic material from wild rice could be transferred into commercial strains.
Once the wild rice’s genetic material was added, the world’s heavily inbred commercial rice strains could be hybridized with ease to produce big gains in crop output.

Mr. Yuan chose to specialize in crop genetics at a time when the subject was an ideological minefield in China. Mao Zedong had embraced the doctrines of Soviet scientists who rejected modern genetics and maintained that genes could be directly rewired by altering environmental conditions, such as the temperature. They claimed this would open the way to dramatic rises in crop yields.

Research Experiment

At that time, the world of rice scientists was full of talk of developing hybrid strains. Three similar papers on rice hybridization were published in 1971 by the International Rice Research Institute, by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi and by a team of California researchers.

But Mr. Yuan’s paper was the most practical and detailed of the four. “His paper was much better in terms of the technology,” Mr. Ali said. “It was China who led the game afterward.” While the teams in India, the Philippines and the United States kept doing research after publishing their papers, Mr. Yuan immediately developed hybrid strains of rice the next year. To create the hybrids, he used wild rice from Hainan.

By 1978, Mr. Yuan had already overseen the start of large-scale production of hybrid rice in Hunan Province, in China’s southwest. He ended up doing most of his research there for the rest of his life. Hybrid rice varieties typically produce 20 to 30 percent more rice per acre than nonhybrid strains when cultivated with the same transplant techniques, fertilizer and water.

But as Mr. Yuan and his ever-growing teams of rice experts introduced hybrid strains across Asia and Africa, they also taught farmers a wide range of advanced rice-growing techniques that produced further gains. Steeply rising yields helped to make famines a distant memory in most rice-growing countries. “He saved a lot — a lot — of lives,” said Hu Yonghong, the director of the 500-acre Shanghai Chenshan Botanical Garden.

After his discoveries in the early 1970s, Mr. Yuan became a strong advocate for sharing his breakthroughs internationally instead of using them to achieve Chinese dominance in rice production. He took the initiative in donating crucial rice strains in 1980 to the International Rice Research Institute, which later used them to develop hybrid varieties that could also grow in tropical countries. Mr. Yuan and his team taught farmers in India, Madagascar, Liberia and elsewhere to grow hybrid rice.

In recent decades, the Communist Party came to celebrate Mr. Yuan as a model scientist: patriotic, dedicated to solving practical problems, and relentlessly hard-working even in old age. At 77, he even carried the Olympic torch near Changsha for a segment of its route to the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

In 2019, he was one of eight Chinese individuals awarded the Medal of the Republic, China’s highest official honor, by Xi Jinping, the national leader. On Sunday, Mr. Xi sent condolences to Mr. Yuan’s family, declaring that Mr. Yuan had “made major contributions to our national food security, agricultural scientific innovation and global food development,” The Hunan Daily reported.

Unusually for such a prominent figure, though, Mr. Yuan never joined the Chinese Communist Party. “I don’t understand politics,” he told a Chinese magazine in 2013. Even so, the Xinhua state news agency honored him this weekend as a “comrade,” and his death brought an outpouring of public mourning in China.