Norman Borlaug
Norman Borlaug bred wheat that is credited with saving perhaps a billion lives. Born in 1914 on an Iowa farm, he worked his way through the University of Minnesota during the Depression, partly as a wrestler, and took a doctorate in plant pathology. He went to Mexico in 1944 on a Rockefeller Foundation programme to raise wheat yields, and stayed for sixteen years. He worked by brute force and one insight. Shuttle breeding — growing two generations a year by moving seed between the highlands near Mexico City and the Sonora desert at a different altitude and season — halved the time to a new variety, and produced strains insensitive to day length, which meant they grew anywhere. He bred for resistance to stem rust, and then hit a limit: fertilised plants grew tall, became top-heavy with grain, and fell over. Crossing in a Japanese dwarfing gene gave short, stiff-strawed plants that could carry heavy heads and respond to fertiliser. Mexico became a wheat exporter by 1963. The varieties went to India and Pakistan in 1965 and 1966, in the middle of war and famine forecasts, over the resistance of grain monopolies and bureaucracies. Both countries roughly doubled production within a decade. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. He argued against the critics who attacked the fertiliser, irrigation and monoculture the system required by saying that they had never been hungry, and that if they lived among the poor they would be asking for tractors. He died in 2009. He was still training young breeders in Mexico in his nineties, and holds the Nobel, the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom together.
- Lived: 1914 CE – 2009 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: agronomist, humanitarian
