Norman Borlaug
1914 – 2009 · United States
Known for: Plant scientist behind the Green Revolution and the wheat varieties credited with averting famine
“A plant breeder who stood between hunger and a billion people.”
Biography
Norman Ernest Borlaug was born on March 25, 1914, on his grandparents' farm at Saude, a Norwegian American settlement in northeastern Iowa, and worked its fields from the age of seven. He was schooled through eighth grade in a one-room country building, failed the University of Minnesota entrance examination in 1933, and was admitted to the university's new two-year General College instead. He wrestled for Minnesota and reached the Big Ten semifinals; while supervising Civilian Conservation Corps crews of hungry, unemployed men in 1935, he saw what food did to them, a lesson he said left scars. A lecture by the plant pathologist Elvin Stakman on the rust fungi that ruin wheat turned him from forestry toward plant pathology, and he completed his doctorate in genetics and plant pathology in 1942.
After two years as a microbiologist at DuPont, Borlaug moved to Mexico in 1944 to join a cooperative wheat program that grew into the research center known as CIMMYT. Breeding in two locations and two seasons a year, he combined rust resistance with high yield and produced semi-dwarf wheats whose short, stiff straw could carry heavy heads without collapsing under fertilizer and irrigation. Mexico, an importer of wheat when he arrived, was exporting it by 1963. He then carried the seed and its accompanying methods to Pakistan and India, where yields nearly doubled between 1965 and 1970. The Nobel Peace Prize came in 1970, for a contribution to peace made by enlarging the world's food supply.
For the rest of his life Borlaug pressed the same approach in Asia and, from the 1980s, in sub-Saharan Africa, and he helped establish the World Food Prize to honor others working on the food supply. He held the Nobel, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal, one of only seven people to have received all three, and was also inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame for his early promotion of the sport. Margaret Borlaug, his wife of sixty-nine years, died in 2007; he died at his home in Dallas on September 12, 2009, at ninety-five. Estimates that his work spared a billion people from starvation cannot be verified precisely, but the wheat he bred is still sown across millions of hectares.