Yuan Longping (; September 7, 1930May 22, 2021) was a Chinese agronomist and inventor. 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". Yuan was bestowed the Medal of the Republic, the highest honorary medal of the People's Republic of China, in September 2019.
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. The technology allowed China to sustain 20% of the global population on 9% of global arable land, an achievement in food security for which he was awarded the 2004 World Food Prize and the 2004 Wolf Prize in Agriculture respectively. 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.
He graduated from Southwest Agricultural College (now part of Southwest University) in 1953.
Career
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. that he had found a few individuals of male-sterile rice with potential for production of hybrid rice. Using this one within a breeding programme resulted in varieties with yields improved by 20 - 30% in the late 1970s.
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.
Early stages of hybrid rice experiments
Ideology
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 did not join the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution or later. In the 1950s, geneticist J. C. Stephens and a few others hybridized two sorghum varieties found in Africa to create high-yielding offspring.
Those results were inspiring for Yuan. However, maize and sorghum reproduce mainly through cross-pollination, while rice is a self-pollinating plant, which would make any crossbreeding attempts difficult, for obvious reasons. In Edmund Ware Sinnott's book Principles of Genetics, it clearly states that self-pollinating plants, like wheat and rice, have experienced long-term selection both by nature and by humans. Therefore, traits that were inferior were all excluded, and the remaining traits were all superior. He speculated that there would be no advantage in crossbreeding rice, and that the nature of self-pollination makes it hard to do cross breed experiments on rice on a large scale.
Honors and awards
Four asteroids and a college in China have been named after him. The minor planet 8117 Yuanlongping was also named after him.
In 2017, he became a laureate of the Asian Scientist 100 by the Asian Scientist.
For his achievements, Yuan was awarded the 2011 Mahathir Science Award. The award was presented by Malaysian former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.
Yuan won the State Preeminent Science and Technology Award of China in 2000, the Wolf Prize in Agriculture and the World Food Prize in 2004. He was a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2006) and the 2006 CPPCC.
Death
On March 10, 2021, Yuan Longping collapsed at his hybrid rice research base in Sanya. On April 7, he was transferred to Changsha, Hunan Province for treatment. At 13:07 on May 22, Yuan Longping died of multiple organ failure at Xiangya Hospital of Central South University at the age of 90. Considered a national hero, tens of thousands of people sent flowers to the funeral home.