Yuan Longping, Plant Scientist Who Helped Curb Famine, Dies at 90:
SHANGHAI — Yuan Longping, a Chinese plant scientist whose breakthroughs in developing high-yield hybrid strains of rice helped to alleviate famine and poverty across much of Asia and Africa, died on Saturday in Changsha, China. He was 90.
The cause was multiple organ failure, China's main state-run newspaper, People's Daily, reported. An earlier report from an official news service in Hunan Province, of which Changsha is the capital, said Mr. Yuan had been increasingly unwell since a fall in March during a visit to a rice-breeding research site.
Mr. Yuan's research made him a national hero and a symbol of dogged scientific pursuit in China. His death triggered messages of grief across the country, where Mr. Yuan — slight, elfin-featured and wizened in old age — was a celebrity. Hundreds left flowers at the funeral home where his body was being kept.
Mr. Yuan made two major discoveries in hybrid rice cultivation, said Jauhar Ali, the senior scientist for hybrid rice breeding at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, the Philippines. Those discoveries, in the early 1970s — together with breakthroughs in wheat cultivation in the '50s and '60s by Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist — helped create the Green Revolution of steeply rising harvests and an end to famine in most of the world.
Mr. Borlaug, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, died in 2009. Mr. Yuan's research arguably had effects at least as broad, since rice is the main grain for half the world's population and wheat for a third.
[...] As recently as this year, Mr. Yuan was still working on developing new varieties of rice, according to Xinhua.
"There's no secret to it; my experience can be summed in four words: knowledge, sweat, inspiration and opportunity," Mr. Yuan said in a video message last year encouraging young Chinese to go into science. In English, he quoted the scientist Louis Pasteur: "Chance favors the prepared mind."
See also: China's Yuan Longping dies; rice research helped feed world
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @10:43PM (12 children)
Here is direct evidence that eating genetically modified rice leads to multiple organ failure, but watch the MSM cover it up.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @11:04PM (4 children)
yeah, well, at least you stay around long enough for organs to fail, instead of starving to death before age 10.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @11:15PM (2 children)
A long painful death, you mean.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @11:41PM
Yeah, cuz starving to death is quick and painless.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday May 26 2021, @12:10AM
Make that "long" go to 120 years and I'm all good.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 27 2021, @12:31AM
Most of the starvation was the result of killing off all the birds that were eating the insects that wound up destroying the rice yields. GMO and hybrids weren't really the solution to the food shortages by the time he was working on it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @11:08PM (5 children)
Not GMO - hybridization is not the same thing as genetic modification.
/pedantry
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 26 2021, @12:00AM (4 children)
From TFA
Hybridization really is a method to obtain genetically modified products. It's the methodology that separates the accepted definitions of GMO and hybrids. And, from the quote above, me might suspect that Mr. Yuan may have used some GMO laboratory techniques to transfer wanted genetics from one plant to another.
Whatever his methodology, Mr. Yuan accomplished far more, and far earlier, than those clowns pushing Golden Rice.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Wednesday May 26 2021, @12:23AM (3 children)
Yes, using whatever GMO engineering was available to China in 1970. Which means cross-pollination.
You can use insects for automation, but they aren't that reliable. So manual pollination will do for small batches, especially if the hybrid is not sterile and one can stabilize the hybrid over 3-5 plant generations.
Same thing the Americans were doing 50 years before with the maize [genetics.org].
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @12:50AM (2 children)
Damn russkies got there first - Mendel's your man.
But not Lysenko, obviousamundo.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday May 26 2021, @01:11AM (1 child)
Ummm... Mendel was a bohemian, if I'm not mistaken. Czech as they come nowadays.
Unrelated, but they have nice workbenches [google.com] too.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 26 2021, @05:02AM
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday May 26 2021, @01:29PM
It could easily be that the fall has triggered bone damage resulting in a severe infection - that can also cause multiple organ failure. Without knowing more about the nature of the fall we have no idea of what caused the organ failure.
Old people are dying everyday from multiple organ failure - many of whom have never even eaten GMO rice. So what do you think caused their demise? There are multiple reasons why organs fail in later life. Age will get us all eventually if we live long enough to let it.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 25 2021, @11:54PM (5 children)
That famine he helped curb is already back! https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/05/madagascar-urgent-humanitarian-intervention-needed-as-millions-face-hunger-due-to-devastating-famine/ [amnesty.org]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 26 2021, @12:12AM
Mr. Yuan couldn't create a strain of rice that will grow without water. Maybe you can take over his work? If so, you can change the Sahara into a giant rice bowl.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @12:57AM (3 children)
It's one of the paradoxes of progress.
Malthus' J curve looks too scary, work hard to push the crash further away. Population grows. J finally happens, is a bigger crash in absolute numbers than it would have been without the progress. His humanitarian work has effectively enabled more people to die.
Compare bubble economies.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @02:14AM (1 child)
Well the reason why so many children are dying is because these bunch did a great job so a huge bunch of children became adults and produced even more children...
Now if they had focused on producing adults who wouldn't breed indiscriminately then the problem would be smaller, but then these groups would have smaller budgets right? Harder to justify a fat salary and luxury cars if you have a smaller team handling smaller problems.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:08AM
I wouldn't call UNICEF "useless", but they aren't what they used to be. Last time I looked, their percentage of donations that actually reached people in need had dropped significantly.
Hmmm - looks like maybe they have rebounded. Browse the numbers, see what you think of them -
https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.history.detail&orgid=4617 [charitynavigator.org]
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday May 26 2021, @02:46AM
It doesn't matter how scary the curve looks, when it's not happening. There is a massive, global drop in humanity fertility world-wide which can't be explained by Malthus. The narrative needs work.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 26 2021, @12:20AM (5 children)
Born in 1930, Mr. Yuan survived wave after wave of attempts to kill off people like himself. China's civil war, the Japanese invasion, then the continued civil war, and then that Great Leap Forward. His refusal to join the Communist Party, combined with rejecting communist doctrine that genetics was a waste of time. Someone was looking out for the man, for him to survive the Cultural Revolution. Academics were primary targets in every upheaval in his lifetime.
Maybe someone should make a documentary of his life. There aren't many people who survive so many attempts to kill them.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @12:46AM (1 child)
Overpopulation is mankind's biggest problem, so maybe this guy wasn't such a saint.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday May 26 2021, @01:15PM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @12:53AM (2 children)
This man and few others brought about the Green Revolution that saved billions of lives from starvation and abject poverty over decades.
Let's have and pay some respect for these true heroes of mankind.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:00AM (1 child)
*cough*
Nothing I said was disrespectful. If anything, I'm in awe of the man who survived all the purges in China, and managed to accomplish something meaningful. Chairman Mao himself badmouthed the man, and he survived, without fleeing to the west.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:40AM
No, you were quite respectable, and I was just adding onto it.
The man has done good.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday May 26 2021, @02:35PM
I guess he didn't die of starvation from famine.
The Centauri traded Earth jump gate technology in exchange for our superior hair mousse formulas.