Nobel laureate and University alumnus Norman Borlaug has won the National Medal of Science
Alumnus Norman Borlaug receives National Medal of Science
Coveted medal is the latest honor for Nobel laureate Borlaug's work in hunger prevention
By Deane Morrison and Martha Coventry
February 10, 2006; updated July 17, 2007
He is far from a household name in the United States, yet the work of Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug may have saved a billion lives. Plant breeders are not exactly the most likely of celebrities, but in many developing countries, Borlaug is a hero. On Monday, Feb. 13, Borlaug visits the White House to receive a rare honor for American scientists: the National Medal of Science, to be conferred by President Bush.
Borlaug now has "triple
crown"
On July 17, 2007, Norman Borlaug received the Congressional Gold
Medal, joining Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Elie Wiesel,
and Nelson Mandela as the only people to have been honored with
this award, the Nobel Peace Prize, and the Presidential Medal of
Freedom.
You can learn more about the White House ceremony, read transcripts
of remarks, and see more photos at
a special Web page the College of Food, Agricultural and
Natural Resource Sciences developed to mark this honor.
Borlaug's gift, which he is still using at 92, is a devotion to ending world hunger and figuring out how to get more food out of fewer acres. He has spent most of his life trying to help people all over the world live a decent life.
Borlaug's gift, which he is still using at 92, is a devotion to
ending world hunger and figuring out how to get more food out of
fewer acres. He has spent most of his life trying to help people
all over the world live a decent life. "I heard him give a lecture
to undergrads and I was struck by what an accessible, down-to-earth
person he was, even with such a distinguished title and so many
accomplishments," says Nadilia Gomez, a Ph.D. student in applied
plant sciences and a native of Panama who has since become an
acquaintance of Borlaug. "So many of us go into grad school hoping
we'll have a significant impact on the world, but he didn't start
out like that. He started out interested in plants, in learning
about plant physiology, and just by being in the moment and doing
what he wanted to do, he got there. His work has been
controversial, but he's a man who still has his convictions and
above all feels strongly about trying to do your best. That's what
inspires me." Borlaug is called the father of the Green Revolution
(a dramatic increase in crop yields due to improved seeds, the use
of fertilizers, and irrigation) and developed--through careful and
unconventional breeding methods--short, strong varieties of wheat
that led to a doubling and tripling of the yields of taller
varieties, and were also resistant to disease, and could be planted
in a wide range of climates. Beginning in 1944, it took him two
decades, working in test plots in Mexico, to develop this
"semi-dwarf variety" wheat, so-called because of its short stature.
Impatient with only one crop per season, he started growing the
same wheat varieties in two different locations in a method now
called "shuttle breeding." "The way he did his research is still
having an impact on researchers today," says Jim Anderson,
associate professor in agronomy and plant genetics and a
wheat-breeding expert. "When he was in Mexico, he did his breeding
at two locations-quite distinct in latitude and temperature. Up
until then, it was thought that you needed locally adapted
varieties so you needed to do your breeding in the areas where the
crop would eventually be grown. But he showed us that you could
breed for wide use." Although this highly adaptable wheat variety
allowed Mexico, in a few short years, to move from being heavily
dependent on wheat imports to being a wheat exporter, it was
principally Borlaug's work in India and Pakistan that won him the
Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 by helping those countries avert the
famine in the 1960s and '70s that many thought inevitable due to
population growth. India's wheat yield nearly doubled from 1965 to
1970; Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production by 1968.
Parallel methods were also used in developing short-statured high
yield rice and, now, other varieties of crops around the world.
If
there is such a thing as a Midwestern character, Borlaug seems to
have it in spades. Everyone who speaks of him mentions his
connection to his family-he told Minnesota magazine that when he
worked in Mexico, he would drive 300 miles home to Mexico City on
"miserable" roads on a Friday night to coach his son's Little
League games, and drive 300 miles back to the test plots on Sunday
night. He is noticeably humble, tenacious, and single-minded about
what he believes is the right thing to do. Phil Pardey, a professor
in the department of applied economics who has worked with Borlaug,
says Borlaug isn't just a plant breeder focused on his work in the
field and the lab, but a rare type of scientist who does everything
in his power to get his crops to the people who need them and
freely share his knowledge with the rest of the world. In an
analogy with open source software, Pardey sees Borlaug as an "open
source" scientist who, along with his colleagues, had a global
impact on wheat production by fostering the international flow of
improved crop varieties. "We did an economic study in the impact of
CIMMYT (Centro International de mejormientao de Maiz y
Trigo)--where Norm spent most of his career--not on the developing
world, but on the developed world," say Pardey. "Turns out that in
the early 1990s in California, which is a pretty big wheat state,
either every variety came directly from that program or both
parents came from that program. Just the value of this research the
United States alone is upwards of $13. 6 billion from improved crop
yields." People young enough to be Borlaug's great-grandchildren
are inspired by his energy and commitment. Sangeetha Gummadi, a
freshman majoring in agricultural education, wrote an essay on
Borlaug as one of the requirements for the Siehl Scholarship she
received from COAFES. "I did a ton of research and I just loved
learning about what he did and how he went about learning it," says
Gummadi. "I focused on the science of his work and how he just
didn't give up. In high school, he really inspired me to keep
trucking along." Gummadi made it to the top five in the National
FFA Agriscience Fair for her work on the effect of sucrose on plant
protoplasts. Borlaug's work has a reach that hasn't really been
appreciated yet. The historically unprecedented increase in crop
yields that his research helped bring about has protected millions
of acres of fragile land from being plowed because, with high yield
crops, more food can be grown on fewer acres. The international
research centers where he did much of his work continue that
research while also conserving more than 670,000 samples of crop
seeds in gene banks worldwide that today's crop breeders are using
to feed future generations. These days, Borlaug is a Distinguished
Professor of International Agriculture at Texas A&M, senior
consultant to the director general of CIMMYT, and a lecturer at
universities worldwide. He has also turned his attention to Africa
as president of the Sasakawa Africa Association, where he works
with former President Jimmy Carter to bring improved varieties of
wheat, corn, and native crops to that continent. With the world
population expected to increase to 9.2 billion, from 6.4 billion
today, in the next 50 years, the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organization and the United Nations Population Fund
estimate the need for a 75 percent increase in the world's food
supply. The work Norman Borlaug has done in the last 50 years will
undoubtedly help us get there. The National Medal of Science is
administered by the National Science Foundation. Another person
with strong University connections, Leonid Hurwicz, a retired
University Regents Professor of Economics, received the medal in
1990. For more on Borlaug, click here. Links to articles on
Borlaug are also on his alma mater's Web site.