Norman Borlaug dies

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning researcher who developed a high-yielding variety of disease resistant wheat and improved varieties of other crop plants that fed legions of starving people died this Saturday (September 12). Norman Borlaug won the 1970 peace prize for launching the green revolution -- which more than doubled world food production from the 1960s to the 1990s -- from his post at a research institute in Mexico. According to Texas A&M University, where Borlaug was a distinguished professor, the agronomist died from complications of cancer. He was 95 years old.

Image: Courtesy of the International Maize
and Wheat Improvement Center

"[Borlaug] has been an inspirational and motivational reference point for the next generation of agricultural scientists, who have felt underappreciated and underfunded," linkurl:Robert Paarlberg,;http://www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/Profile/mr/rpaarlberg.html a Harvard political scientist and author of the book linkurl:__Starved for Science__,;http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/PAASTA.html told __The Scientist__. "Every one of them would want to be the next Norman Borlaug," added Paarlberg, who served on the board of charitable non-profit Winrock International with Borlaug. linkurl:Kendal Hirschi,;http://www.bcm.edu/cnrc/faculty/kendalh.htm a Baylor University pediatrician and geneticist who studies ways to make more healthy vegetables using transgenic technologies, agreed with Paarlberg, but said that Borlaug was likely one of a kind. "We probably won't see someone like that again," Hirschi told __The Scientist__. "His capacity to affect change was so dramatic." Borlaug's relationship with crops and farming started early. He was born in 1914 on a farm near Cresco, Iowa. After studying forestry at the University of Minnesota in the 1930s, Borlaug worked for the US Forestry Service in Massachusetts and Idaho. He later returned to the University of Minnesota to study plant pathology, earning his doctorate in 1942. In the early 1940s, Borlaug worked as a microbiologist at the duPont de Nemours Foundation in Delaware, studying fungicides, bactericides, and preservatives. But in 1944, Borlaug was offered an opportunity that would change his life, and the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world. That year, he accepted a post as a geneticist and plant pathologist at an institution called the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program in Mexico that was jointly supported by the Mexican government and the Rockefeller Foundation. Within 20 years of working in Mexico, Borlaug had used breeding and selection to develop a stout variety of wheat that produced more grain and was more resistant to disease than conventional varieties. The immediate impact on the country's wheat production was dramatic. Mexico produced 250,000 tons of wheat in 1945, 1 million tons in 1956, and 2.5 million tons by 1965 -- a 10-fold, productivity-driven increase seen in the time Borlaug was working on the country's wheat crops. The 1960s saw Borlaug exporting his expertise and his innovative crop varieties to other countries where people suffered under the oppression of hunger and food shortages. Borlaug helped to buoy agriculture in several countries in Latin America, throughout the Near and Middle East, and in Africa. In 1984, Borlaug took a faculty position at Texas A&M, and continued to split his time between there and the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program in Mexico, where he mentored students and participated in research. In 1986, his years of lobbying the Nobel Foundation to create a new prize that specifically honored people who made improvements to the world's food supply paid off in the form of the World Food Prize, which is awarded annually. Still active late in life, Borlaug spoke at last year's ceremony, which is held in his home state of Iowa every year. Borlaug seemed to focus his attentions on working with people and in farm fields rather than on amassing authorship credits on scientific manuscripts. In a speech presenting Borlaug with his Nobel Prize, Aase Lionaes, Chairman of the Nobel Committee, recounted one of the researcher's constant refrains. "Many people, we are told, who ask him to lecture or write a paper, get the following reply: 'What would you rather have - bread or paper?'" Though Borlaug was working in agricultural science before the dawn of genetic engineering, he was an advocate of the techniques and their application to help lessen hunger and malnutrition. "I don't see any reason why [Borlaug] would have hesitated to put [transgenic technologies] to use" had they existed in the 1940s, 50s, or 60s, said Paarlberg. "He was a strong defender of the application of genetic engineering to agricultural science." "He was always pushing the latest technology," Hirschi concurred. "Even as he got older, he was willing to pursue any technology to cure the world's hunger problems." Borlaug won several prizes throughout his long career, including Iowa's highest honor, the Iowa Award, in 1978, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Service Medal of the National Academy of Science, and a Congressional Gold Medal. He held more than 55 honorary doctorate degrees from more than a dozen countries, and served on two US Presidential Commissions on World Hunger. Borlaug's memory lives on in several educational buildings -- Borlaug Hall at the University of Minnesota, the Norman E. Borlaug Center for Southern Crop Improvement at Texas A&M University, the Norman E. Borlaug Institute of Biotechnology at Leicester University in the United Kingdom, and even a grade school in Azcapotzalco, Mexico City -- that bear his name. Despite the numerous kudos heaped upon Borlaug throughout his lifetime and his impact on salving world hunger, his name is not immediately recognizable to those outside the field of agricultural sciences. Hirschi likened Borlaug's impact and the amount of honors bestowed upon the researcher to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. "He is the MLK in the field of agricultural sciences, but the lay people don't know him," he said. "And that's a sad thing. He did so much." Borlaug is survived by his two children, Jeanie Borlaug Laube and William, five grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.
**__Related stories:__***linkurl:Where's the Super Food?;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/55926/
[September 2009]*linkurl:USDA creates Borlaug fellowships;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/22101/
[8th April 2004]

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