Yuan Longping

Yuan Longping (August 13, 1929May 22, 2021) was a Chinese agronomist and inventor.

Yuan was born at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, China on August 13,1929 to Yuan Xinglie and Hua Jing.

He was the second of six siblings.

His ancestral home is in De'an County, Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province in Southern China.

During the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War, he moved with his family and attended school in many places, including Hunan, Chongqing, Hankou and Nanjing.

China's total rice output rose from 56.9 million tons in 1950 to 194.7 million tons in 2017.

The annual yield increase is enough to feed 70 million additional people.

As recently as the 1950s, two separate theories of heredity were taught in China.

One theory was from Gregor Mendel and Thomas Hunt Morgan and was based on the concept of genes and alleles.

The other theory was from Soviet Union scientists Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin and Trofim Lysenko which stated that organisms would change over the course of their lives to adapt to environmental changes they experienced and their offspring would then inherit the changes.

At the time, the Chinese government's official stance on scientific theories was one of "leaning towards the Soviet side", and any ideology from the Soviet Union was deemed to be the only truth while everything else would be seen as being invalid.

Yuan, as an agricultural student at Southwest University, remained skeptical on both theories and started his own experiments to try and come up with his own conclusions.

He graduated from Southwest Agricultural College (now part of Southwest University) in 1953.

Yuan began his teaching career at the Anjiang Agricultural School, Hunan Province.

In the 1960s he had the idea of hybridizing rice to increase its yield after reading of similar research that was underway successfully in maize and sorghum.

Undertaking this hybridization was important because the first generation of hybrids is typically more vigorous and productive than either parent.

For the rest of his life Yuan devoted himself to the research and development of better rice varieties.

The biggest problem was that rice is a self-pollinating plant.

Hybridization requires separate male and female plants as parents.

The small rice flowers contain both male and female parts.

Although the male parts can be removed, carefully, by hand (to produce female-only flowers), this is not practical on a large scale.

It was thus difficult to produce hybrid rice in large quantities.

In 1961 he spotted a seed-head of wild hybrid rice.

By 1964, Yuan hypothesized that naturally-mutated male-sterile rice could exist and could be used for the creation of new hybrid rice varieties.

He and a student spent the summer searching for male sterile rice plants.

Two years later he reported in a scientific publication that he had found a few individuals of male-sterile rice with potential for production of hybrid rice.

Subsequent experiments proved his original hypothesis feasible, which proved to be his most important contribution to hybrid rice.

Yuan went on to solve more problems over the next decades to achieve higher yielding hybrid rice.

This took more than a decade.

The first experimental hybrid rice did not show any significant advantage over commonly grown varieties, so Yuan suggested crossbreeding cultivated rice varieties with ones growing wild in the countryside.

He was a 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".

Hybrid rice has since been grown in dozens of countries in Africa, America, and Asia—boosting food security and providing a robust food source in areas with a high risk of famine.

In 1970, beside a railway line in Hainan, he and his team found a particularly important wild variety.

Using this one within a breeding programme resulted in varieties with yields improved by 20 - 30% in the late 1970s.

For this achievement, Yuan Longping was dubbed the "Father of Hybrid Rice."

At present, as much as 50 percent of China's total number of rice paddies grow Yuan Longping's hybrid rice and these hybrid rice paddies yield 60 percent of the total rice production in China.

The "Super Rice" Yuan worked on improving showed a 30 percent higher yield, compared to common rice, with a record yield of 17,055 kilograms per hectare being registered in Yongsheng County in Yunnan Province in 1999.

The technology allowed China to sustain 20% of the global population on 9% of global arable land, an achievement in food security where he was awarded the 2004 World Food Prize and the 2004 Wolf Prize in Agriculture respectively.

In January 2014, Yuan said in an interview that genetically modified food would be the future direction of food and that he had been working on genetic modification of rice.