China's “Father of Hybrid Rice”

 Yuan Longping, center, stands in a field of hybrid rice in Handan in northern China's Hebei Province. Yuan, 90, a scientist who developed higher-yield varieties of rice that helped feed people around the world, died Saturday May 22, 2021, at a hospital in the city of Changsha, China. Yuan spent his life researching rice and was a household name in China, known by the nickname “Father of Hybrid Rice.” Worldwide, a fifth of all rice now comes from species created by hybrid rice following Yuan’s breakthrough discoveries, according to the website of the World Food Prize, which he won in 2004.

On Saturday afternoon, large crowds honored the scientist by marching past the hospital in Hunan province where he died, local media reported, calling out phrases such as: “Grandpa Yuan, have a good journey!” Chinese, “元爷爷，一路走好！”

It was in the 1970s when Yuan achieved the breakthroughs that would make him a household name. He developed a hybrid strain of rice that recorded an annual yield 20% higher than existing varieties — meaning it could feed an extra 70 million people a year, according to Xinhua.

His work helped transform China from “food deficiency to food security” within three decades, according to the World Food Prize, which was created by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug in 1986 to recognize scientists and others who have improved the quality and availability of food.

Yuan and his team worked with dozens of countries around the world to address issues of food security as well as malnutrition.

Even in his later years, Yuan did not stop doing research. In 2017, working with a Hunan agricultural school, he helped create a strain of low-cadmium indica rice for areas suffering from heavy metal pollution, reducing the amount of cadmium in rice by more than 90%. 

Yuan Longping (Chinese: 袁隆平; September 7, 1930 – May 22, 2021) was a Chinese agronomist, 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". 

Professor Yuan LongPing

TROPICAL AGRICULTURE - AWARD RECIPIENT FOR 2011

Full name: Professor Yuan LongPing

Date of Birth: 7, September, 1930.

Affiliations (at the time of the award): Professor, Director General of Hunan Hybrid Rice Research

Field: Agriculture

Summary of body of work recognised by MSA: The 2011 Mahathir Science Award (MSA) is awarded to Professor Yuan LongPing in recognition of his courage in independent thinking out of the norm in rice breeding resulting in the innovative development of hybrid rice, a staple food of the tropics that has revolutionized global rice production and sustainability.

Latest Biography: Professor Yuan Long Ping, known as ‘Father of Hybrid Rice’ was born on 7 September 1930 in Beijing. In 1949, Professor Yuan completed his high school courses and entered South-western Agricultural College in Chongqing majoring in agronomy. This marked the beginning of his lifelong work in agriculture. Upon his graduation in 1953, he took a teaching job at the Anjiang Agricultural School in Hunan Province. He taught Russian, botany, crop cultivation, breeding and genetics. While teaching, he also conducted scientific experiments involving asexual crossings between crops, using the Russian theories, however realised the faults of the Russian models and sought to retool his methodology. By secretly reading Western magazines such as Crop Science, he managed to learn an approach to science that was different.

The disastrous famine in China from 1958 to 1961 led Professor Yuan to focus his research on the development of high-yielding rice. By then, he had given up his experiments on asexual crossing and begun using artificial hybridization to develop new rice varieties. Observing the results of hybridization in corn, he developed the novel idea of utilizing hybrids to increase rice yield.

In the 1960s, utilization of heterosis on a large-scale has seemed beyond the range of plant scientists for rice, a self-pollinated crop. By the early 1960s, many scientists believed that there was no heterosis for self-pollinated crops like rice and no solutions for high yielding hybrid seed production in self-pollinated crops. However, Professor Yuan took the unknown path into an area full of scepticism and made breakthrough, which made other scientists benefit from this discovery of new knowledge. When news of his work on rice hybrid reached the Western scientific circles, many were sceptical including the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Philippines, which had tried rice hybrid research before 1962 but eventually gave up. However, Professor Yuan introduced Chinese hybrid rice to the world in 1979 at an international conference sponsored by IRRI. The following year, IRRI restored its own hybrid rice research.

When the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution occurred in China from 1966-1976, intellectuals who dared to voice different opinions were branded as rightists and counterrevolutionaries, and faces being purged from their positions as many were sent to labor in farms in the countryside. Professor Yuan’s experimental seedlings were seized when some politicians were outraged when he added ‘time’ to Mao’s eight-word constitution on agriculture. He moved his research work from Hunan to Hainan Island and Yunnan Province. It was on Hainan Island in 1970, a natural male sterile wild-rice plant (wild rice with flowers containing no pollen) was found. This led to the promising discovery to rapid progress in the development of hybrid rice. Consequently in 1972, China’s State Science and Technology Commission listed hybrid rice as a key national research project.

Due to his hard work, China’s total rice output rose from 5.69 billion tons in 1950 to 19.47 billion tons in 2000. In recent years, hybrid rice has covered an area of 16millions ha, accounting for 57% of total rice area in China. The increased grains by planting hybrid rice can feed 70 millions more people annually in China, and provides additional income to thousands of farmer today. This hybrid rice not only give high percent yield advantages, but also contributed to the reduction of the land area planted rice and the subsequent diversification of crops and still maintaining the quality of the rice.

His techniques for hybrid rice have been commercialised spreading throughout Asia and to Africa and the Americas including Vietnam, Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and USA, etc. In 2004, he came to Malaysia and shared his knowledge through lectures on rice hybridization. The Perlis Hybrid Rice Research Centre was established at the state of Perlis with Professor Yuan as chief consultant. His work as resulted in making rice production more sustainable by increasing the yield productivity well beyond the expectation.

Professor Yuan has published about 60 articles and his work has greatly influenced other research fields, such as Plant Sciences, Agriculture and Applied Biotechnology. In recognition of his work, he has received numerous award and honours, which include the 2000 National Supreme Scientific and Technological award, 2001 Raman Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the 2004 World Food Prize and the 2004 Wolf Prize in agriculture.