“杂交水稻之父”袁隆平，帮助世界解决饥荒和贫困

Yuan Longping, Plant Scientist Who Helped Curb Famine, Dies at 90

KEITH BRADSHER

第一段

SHANGHAI — Yuan Longping, a Chinese plant scientist whose breakthroughs in developing high-yield hybrid strains of rice helped to alleviate famine and poverty across much of Asia and Africa, died on Saturday in Changsha, China. He was 90.

His research made him a national hero and a symbol of dogged scientific pursuit in China. His death triggered messages of grief across the country, where Mr. Yuan — slight, elfin-featured and wizened in old age — was a celebrity. Hundreds left flowers at the funeral home where his body was being kept.

Mr. Yuan made two major discoveries in hybrid rice cultivation. Those discoveries in the early 1970s, together with breakthroughs in wheat cultivation in the 1950s and 1960s by Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist, helped create the Green Revolution of steeply rising harvests and an end to famine in most of the world.

By 1970, Mr. Yuan was growing frustrated with his halting progress in creating more productive rice crops. He hit upon a shift in strategy: search for wild varieties across remote areas of China for more promising genetic material.

A breakthrough came when Mr. Yuan's team came upon a stretch of wild rice near a rail line on Hainan Island in southernmost China. The following year, Mr. Yuan separately published a research paper in China that explained how genetic material from wild rice could be transferred into commercial strains.

Once the wild rice's genetic material was added, the world's heavily inbred commercial rice strains could be hybridized with ease to produce big gains in crop output.

As Mr. Yuan and his ever-growing teams of rice experts introduced hybrid strains across Asia and Africa, they also taught farmers a wide range of advanced rice-growing techniques that produced further gains.

Steeply rising yields helped to make famines a distant memory in most rice-growing countries. He saved a lot — a lot — of lives.

第二段

Xu Zhihong, a former president of Peking University and a longtime professor of life sciences there, said that Mr. Yuan's underlying talent was always clear: He paid minute attention to rice plants and how they grew.

Mr. Yuan also had an enormous effect on Chinese agriculture because he was a good mentor and a strong leader of teams, the botanists agreed. So Mr. Yuan ended up playing a far larger role than if he had confined himself to laboratory work and writing papers.

第三段

After his discoveries in the early 1970s, Mr. Yuan became a strong advocate for sharing his breakthroughs internationally instead of using them to achieve Chinese dominance in rice production.

In recent decades, the Communist Party came to celebrate Mr. Yuan as a model scientist: patriotic, dedicated to solving practical problems, and relentlessly hard-working even in old age. At 77, he even carried the Olympic torch near Changsha for a segment of its route to the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

"There's no secret to it, my experience can be summed in four words: knowledge, sweat, inspiration and opportunity," Mr. Yuan said in a video message last year encouraging young Chinese to go into science. In English, he quoted the scientist Louis Pasteur: "Chance favors the prepared mind."