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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: 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