Norman Borlaug |
|
President George W. Bush congratulates Dr. Norman Bourlag during the Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony held on July 17, 2007, at the U.S. Capitol to honor Professor Bourlag’s efforts to combat hunger. Also pictured is House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, left, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY CHRIS GREENBERG. |
|
Norman Borlaug (second from left) shown here consulting with Kenyan and CIMMYT leaders near wheat plots in Kenya. USDA PHOTO BY KAY SIMMONS. |
|
| |
|
OBITUARIES
Norman E. Borlaug
The world lost a great scientist, humanitarian, and true hero with the death of Norman E. Borlaug, who succumbed to lymphoma on September 12, 2009, at his home in Dallas, Tex. Norm was 95 years of age, had worked for 65 years after receiving his PhD in plant pathology from the University of Minnesota in 1942, and had an outstandingly productive career. The wheat varieties he developed, with broad and stable disease resistance, broad adaptation to growing conditions and latitude, and high yield potential helped hundreds of millions of people escape a life of hunger and poverty. He not only worked in the laboratory and field to breed these high-yielding wheat varieties, he was also tenacious in helping and pushing other scientists, governments, donors, and the private sector to deliver the new seeds to the small-scale farmers who needed them. Some claim that through his work he saved over a billion lives.
Of the numerous awards and honors Norm received over the years, six should be mentioned here: the Nobel Peace Prize, the Congressional Gold Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Science Foundation’s National Medal of Science, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, and the ASPB Leadership in Science and Public Service Award. The latter was awarded in 2002 when he gave an inspirational speech at the ASPB Annual Meeting in Denver, Colo. Despite all his awards, though, Norm remained a humble man who sought no attention for himself but rather only for the cause that drove him: ending hunger throughout the world.
Within the United States Norm was little known outside the plant science and agriculture communities. But outside the USA he was widely known and considered a hero. I had the privilege of traveling with him in rural areas on several occasions. We would spend dawn to dusk visiting research stations and farmers. Norm loved to talk with young scientists—he trained hundreds—and with farmers, inspiring the former and learning from the latter. At the end of a long, hard day when we returned to the hotel or guest house, there would be local reporters and dignitaries waiting to see him. He would meet with them until late at night, telling the reporters that the farmers were poorly served and getting ready to revolt and telling the officials that they had better do a better job of serving farmers or else they would have a revolt on their hands. The next day there would be headlines in the local paper quoting Norm about the plight of local farmers and quoting government officials about their new plans to help solve the farmers’ problems.
Norman Borlaug’s career began as a forester working for the U.S. Forest Service. He then returned to the University of Minnesota and received his master’s and doctoral degrees in plant pathology working under the legendary pathologist E. C. Stakman. After graduating he worked for DuPont in Delaware for two years. In 1944 he joined the Rockefeller Foundation’s cooperative agricultural program in Mexico, at the time a high-risk, start-up, field program, first as pathologist and soon as the lead wheat breeder. He was employed by the Rockefeller Foundation for 39 years, including on secondment to the newly established International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) beginning in 1966 until reaching retirement age in 1983.
In his early years in Mexico, Norm’s assignment was to introduce stable resistance to rust disease into Mexico’s tropical and subtropical wheats. Impatient as always, he recognized that in Mexico he could double the speed of his breeding program by growing two generations a year. Norm’s team planted and evaluated test plots at Chapingo in the Central Highlands in the summer, quickly harvested seeds from the best plants, shipped them 700 miles north to the Yaqui Valley in Sonora, planted and evaluated the next generation there in the winter, and quickly harvested and shipped seed back down to Chapingo to repeat the process the next year. Data were analyzed and written up at night and on weekends. This innovative “shuttle breeding” technique not only produced new varieties in half the time, it also led to the selection of plants that were insensitive to day length and had broad adaptation to growing conditions and latitudes, including, as Norm would discover later, those of South Asia.
Another of Norm’s great innovations was the development of semi-dwarf wheat. After World War II, a dwarf wheat from Japan was brought to the United States. At Washington State University, USDA wheat breeder Orville Vogel crossed it with a leading winter wheat and obtained semi-dwarf progeny with significantly increased yield potential. In 1953 Dr. Vogel shared these early lines with his friend Norm Borlaug in Mexico (no “research-only MTAs” hindered sharing at that time). Using shuttle breeding, Norm then crossed this material with his rust-resistant Mexican wheats, producing the first semi-dwarf wheats adapted to tropical and subtropical environments. By 1963, 95% of Mexico’s wheat crop used semi-dwarf varieties developed by Norm, the harvest was six times larger than it had been in 1944, and Mexico was a net exporter of wheat.
On the basis of the success of its cooperative program in Mexico, the Rockefeller Foundation had established similar programs in several other countries including India. Under that program and training programs sponsored by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), young wheat scientists from Asia were sent to Mexico for training under Norm. They took back the Mexican wheats and began testing them in Asia. In 1963 India and Pakistan (then including today’s Bangladesh) were facing famine and were highly dependent on food aid. FAO and the Rockefeller Foundation sent Norm on a trip through the region to assess the situation and provide advice. Wheat yields were abysmally low, even on irrigated lands. When fertilizer was added to the farmer’s traditional varieties, they produced more grain but also grew taller and tended to lodge, thus reducing both the harvest and the farmer’s incentive to use fertilizer. However, Norm’s trainees could not wait to show him how the day-length insensitive Mexican semi-dwarf wheats they had taken home were responding to added fertilizer by doubling and tripling yields in test plots. Norm and M. S. Swaminathan, then head of India’s wheat improvement program, recognized the potential value of these breeding lines and began testing advanced Mexican wheats across India with spectacular results. To address worsening famine in the region in 1965, Dr. Swaminathan and Norm convinced the Indian government and Norm convinced the Pakistani government to import semi-dwarf wheat seed from Mexico’s Yaqui Valley, where Norm knew his farmer friends could easily shift from grain production to seed production. Tens of thousands of tonnes of wheat seed were imported from Mexico, rapidly bulked up across the two countries, and distributed to farmers. Pakistan became self-sufficient in wheat production by 1968, and in India wheat production increased from 12.3 million tonnes in 1965 to 20.1 million tonnes in 1970. By 1968 similar results were also being achieved with semi-dwarf rice seed imported from the Philippines and developed by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations–
supported International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). A “Green Revolution” was declared to be occurring in South Asia, and by 1974 India was self-sufficient in cereal production. While many scientists and political leaders played important roles in this amazing accomplishment, Norm was clearly the leading scientific innovator and the driving force behind broad-scale dissemination and adoption of the technology.
Typical of Norm, he did not rest on his laurels following retirement. He became a distinguished professor at Texas A&M University and a senior statesman for agricultural development, but most importantly, he went back to the field, this time in Africa. Serving as president of the Sasakawa Africa Association, he joined forces with the Carter Center in Atlanta to lead Sasakawa-Global 2000, an agricultural development program designed to bring yield-enhancing technologies to small-scale farmers in Africa. In 2006 at the African Fertilizer Summit in Abuja, Nigeria, he gave a rip-roaring speech that challenged African presidents, major donors, and scientists to bring to Africa the same kind of innovation, courage, and leadership that had launched the Green Revolution in Asia in the 1960s. Fortunately, that process in now under way, with Norm Borlaug’s legacy serving as the guiding light.
Gary Toenniessen
The Rockefeller Foundation
|
