Borlaug would later be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the years he had spent shuttling between Mexico City and the Yaqui Valley, growing thousands upon thousands of kinds of wheat, and carefully noting their traits: this kind resisted one type of stem rust, but not another; this kind produced good yields, but made bad bread; and so on.
He couldn't sequence the wheat's DNA to figure out which genes caused which traits, because that technology was decades away. But he could cross the varieties which had some good traits, and hope that one of the cross-breeds would happen to have all the good traits and none of the bad. Borlaug produced new kinds of "dwarf" wheat that resisted rust, yielded well, and - crucially - had short stems, so they didn't topple over in the wind.
Through further tests, he worked out how to maximise their yield - how far apart to plant them, how deep, with how much fertiliser, and how much water they needed. By the s, Borlaug was travelling the world to spread the news.
It wasn't easy. In Pakistan, the director of a research institute reported that they'd tried his wheat, but yields were poor. Borlaug soon saw why.
Ignoring his instructions, they'd planted too deep, too far apart, and without fertilizing or weeding. The man replied, perplexed: "This is the way you plant wheat in Pakistan. Many couldn't conceive that a revolution was possible. For half a century, Pakistan's wheat yields had been consistent: never above lbs kg an acre.
Mexican farmers were now getting more than three times that. So was Mexico's way worth a shot? No, said an eminent academic. Borlaug could be blunt with people who didn't get it, no matter who they were. In India, he got into a yelling match with the deputy prime minister. Eventually his haranguing worked. Developing countries started to import Borlaug's seeds and methods.
And from to , their wheat yields trebled. Similar work followed on corn and rice. It was dubbed the "green revolution". Ehrlich had predicted mass starvation but the world's population more than doubled, and food production kept up.
And yet worries about overpopulation never entirely go away. It's one of the oldest questions in economics, dating back to the world's first professor of "political economy", Thomas Robert Malthus. In , Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population , which made a simple argument: populations increase exponentially - two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two.
Food production doesn't. Sooner or later, he argued, there are bound to be more people than food, with unpleasant consequences. Happily for us, it turned out that Malthus had underestimated the fact that, as people get richer, they tend to want fewer children, so populations grow more slowly. In fact, - the year that Paul Ehrlich made his dire predictions - was also the year in which global population growth began to slow. And rust is now on the move again, with a new breed out of Uganda.
Borlaug's battle may never be completely won and his heirs face unprecedented challenges. As he said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in "It is true that the tide of the battle against hunger has changed for the better…but ebb tide could soon set in, if we become complacent.
The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. David Biello is a contributing editor at Scientific American. Follow David Biello on Twitter. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options.
Discover World-Changing Science. Go All-Electric? Get smart. Along with Ronnie Coffman of Cornell University , Borlaug rallied world leaders in the early s to address the decades of complacency that had resulted in too few wheat scientists working in inadequate breeding and testing facilities, and scarce resources to train the next generation of hunger fighters needed to address this and other threats to wheat. The DRRW aimed to develop rust-resistant varieties of wheat and deploy them to thwart Ug99 and other rust diseases.
Press enter to begin your search. Menu Introduction The Mission Dr. It started with a. His mission was. His findings pioneered.
0コメント