Yuan Longping

Yuan Longping (1962)

Yuan Longping ( Chinese 袁隆平, Pinyin Yuán Lóngpíng ; born  September 7, 1930 in Beijing , † May 22, 2021 in Changsha ) was a Chinese agronomist . From the beginning of the 1970s, he and his research team bred special rice varieties with which the harvest yield could be significantly increased , and is therefore also known as the father of hybrid rice in Chinaknown. Hybrid rice has since been grown in dozens of countries in Africa, America and Asia and provides a robust food source in areas with high risk of hunger.

He died of multiple organ failure on May 22, 2021 at the age of 90 .

Contributions

In 1979, his hybrid rice technique was introduced in the United States, marking the first case of an intellectual property transfer in the history of the People's Republic of China. The 1991 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization statistics show that 20 percent of global rice production comes from 10 percent of the world's rice fields where hybrid rice is grown.

honors and awards

Four asteroids and a university in China were named after him. The minor planet 8117 Yuanlongping was named after him. Yuan received 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 general director of China National Hybrid Rice R&D Center and was appointed professor at Hunan Agricultural University in Changsha. He was a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences (2006) and the CPPCC 2006.

ideology

As recently as the 1950s, two different theories of inheritance were being taught in China. One theory came from Gregor Mendel and Thomas Hunt Morgan and was based on the concept of genes and alleles . The other theory came from Soviet scientists Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin and Trofim Lysenko, and it was that organisms would change over the course of their lives to adapt to environmental changes they experienced, and that their descendants would then inherit those changes. At the time, the Chinese government's official stance on scientific theories was one "leaning to the Soviet side," and any ideology from the Soviet Union was considered the only truth while everything else was considered invalid. Yuan, an agricultural student of Southwest University, remained skeptical of both theories and began experimenting on his own to try to reach his own conclusions.

His first experiment involved the sweet potato . Following Michurin theory grafted he Ipomoea alba (a flower with high photosynthetic rate and high efficiency in the production of starch) on sweet potatoes. These sweet potatoes grew much larger than the sweet potatoes on which he had not grafted the Ipomoea alba, with the largest reaching nearly 8 kg . However, when he grew and planted these grafted sweet potatoes for the second generation, the sweet potatoes produced were still normal sweet potatoes with their original leaves, and the alba flower, which arose from the seeds of the grafted alba / potato hybrid, did not produce sweet potatoes . He continued similar grafting experiments on other plants, but none of the hybridized plants produced offspring with any of the beneficial traits that had been grafted on their parents, which was in complete contradiction to Michurin's theory. In Yuan's conclusions on his experiments, he wrote: “I had learned a lot about the background of Mendel's and Morgan's theory, and I knew from magazine articles that it was proven through experiments and real-world agricultural applications such as seedless watermelons. I wanted to read more and learn more, but I can only do it in secret. "

famine

In 1959, China experienced the Great Chinese Famine . As an agronomist, Yuan could do little to provide decisive help to the people around him in Hunan Province . “There was nothing left in the field because the hungry people took everything edible they could find with them. They eat grass, seeds, fern roots, or in the extreme case, even white clay. ”[Quote] Yuan considered applying the inheritance rules to sweet potatoes and wheat, as they were the practical solution to famine because of their rapid growth rate. However, he realized that the sweet potato was never part of the daily diet in southern China and that wheat did not grow well in that area. So he turned to rice.

Heterosis

In 1906, the geneticist George Harrison Shull carried out experiments with the hybrid corn. He observed that inbreeding reduced the vitality and production of the offspring, but crossbreeding did the opposite. These experiments proved the concept of heterosis . In the 1950s, geneticist JC Stephens and several others took advantage of the hybrid of two breeds found in Africa and created the highly productive seeds for sorghum . These results were inspiring to Yuan. However, maize and sorghum achieve pollination primarily through cross- pollination , while rice is a self-pollinating plant, which would make any attempt at crossbreeding difficult for obvious reasons. In Edmund Ware Sinnott's book "Principles of Genetics" it becomes clear that self-pollinating plants such as wheat and rice are subject to long-term selection by both nature and humans. Therefore, all inferior traits have been excluded, and the remaining traits are all superior. He speculated that there would be no benefit in crossing rice. And the nature of self-pollination makes it difficult to conduct cross-breeding experiments with rice on a large scale.

Web links

Commons : Yuan Longping  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

1. ^ National hero and agricultural researcher Yuan Longping has died. Deutschlandfunk , Die Nachrichten, May 22, 2021, accessed on May 22, 2021 . 
2. ↑ Steffen Wurzel : Scientist turns 90. China celebrates the "father of hybrid rice". tagesschau.de , September 7, 2020, accessed on September 7, 2020 . 
3. ↑ Josephine Ma: China's 'father of hybrid rice' Yuan Longping dies at 90 . In: South China Morning Post , May 22, 2021. Retrieved May 23, 2021. 

Note: In this article, the family name is placed before the first name of the person. This is the usual order in Chinese. Yuan is the family name here, Longping is the first name.