Professor Yuan Longping is one of the scientific giants in modern agricultural research and has made a dramatic impact on worldwide food production. Professor Longping has developed innovative strategies to significantly enhance rice yields, utilizing cytoplasmic male sterility that has led to the development of hybrid rice. Under his leadership, and after a decade of cooperative research efforts among hundreds of rice scientists from numerous research institutes and universities, rice yields were generally enhanced by 20 percent, and China rice production, by 50 percent.

Professor Longping has further pioneered “super hybrids” utilizing inter-specific heterosis. As an agricultural scientist, Yuan Longping’s concerns go beyond China’s food supply and extend to the enormous problem of world hunger. To help increase world food supply, he has shared his knowledge, techniques, and breeding materials, with scientists worldwide.

Biography
Mr. Yuan was born in Beijing, China. He loves playing Mahjong and the Erhu (Chinese violin), swimming and motorcycling. He was born in 1930 and a graduate from the Southwest Agriculture Institute in 1953, Yuan began his teaching career at an agriculture school in Anjiang, Hunan Province.

He came up with an idea for hybridizing rice in the 1960s, when a series of natural disasters and inappropriate policies had plunged China into an unprecedented famine that caused many deaths. Since then, he has devoted himself to the research and development of a better rice breed. In 1964, he happened to find a natural hybrid rice plant that had obvious advantages over others. Greatly encouraged, he began to study the elements of this particular type. The biggest problem by then, was having no known method to reproduce hybrid rice in mass quantities, and that was what Yuan set out to solve.

In 1964, Yuan created his theory of using the probably-existing naturally-mutated androecium-sterile rice individuals for the creation of reproductive hybrid rice species, and in two years he managed to find a few individuals of such androecium-sterile rice that he foretelled, which could be used for his research. Subsequent experiments proved his theory feasible, which was his most important contribution on hybrid rice.

Yuan went on to solve several following major problems. In 1970, he found another important specie of wild rice for the creation of high-yield hybrid rice species. In 1973, in cooperation with others, he was finally able to establish a complete process of creating and reproducing high-yield hybrid rice species. The next year they successfully cultivate a type of hybrid rice species which had great advantages. It yielded 20 percent more per unit than that of common ones, putting China in the lead worldwide in rice production. For this achievement, he was dubbed the "Father of Hybrid Rice."

At present, as many as 50 percent of China's total rice fields grow Yuan Longping’s hybrid rice species and yield 60 percent of the rice production in China. Due to Yuan's hard work, China's total rice output rose from 5.69 billion tons in 1950 to 19.47 billion tons last year, about 300 billion kilograms more have been produced over the last twenty years. The annual yield increase is enough to feed 60 million people.

The "Super Rice" Yuan is now working on yields are 30 percent higher than those of common rice. A record yield of 17,055 kilograms per hectare was registered in Yongsheng County in Yunnan Province in 1999.

Contribution to the World
In 1979, his technique for hybrid rice was introduced into the United States, the first case of intellectual property rights transfer in the history of new China.

He has gone abroad every year to provide guidance. He also sent scientists to India, Vietnam, Myanmar and Bangladesh to work as advisors. Between 1981 and 1998, the Hunan Hybrid Rice Research Center under Yuan Longping held 38 training classes with over 100 participants from 15 countries. With the help of Chinese scientists, the acreage of hybrid rice in Vietnam and India increased to 200,000 hectares and 150,000 hectares respectively in 1999.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization 1991 statistics show that 20 percent of the world's rice output came from 10 percent of the world's rice fields that grow hybrid rice.

Honors and Awards
Four asteroids and a college in China were named after him.

Mr. Yuan won the State Preeminent Science and Technology Award of China in 2000, the Wolf Prize in agriculture and the World Food Prize in 2004.

He is currently the Director-General of the China National Hybrid Rice R&D Center and has been appointed as Professor at Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha. He is a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2006) and the 2006 CPPCC.

Yuan worked as the chief consultant for the FAO in 1991.

Literature
The man who puts an end to hunger: Yuan Longping, “Father of Hybrid Rice”. Foreign Languages Press, Beijing 2007, ISBN 978-7-119-05109-3.
 
Source: Wolf Foundation, wiki