Yuan Longping

Yuan was born at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, China on August 13,1929 to Yuan Xinglie and Hua Jing. He was the second of six siblings.[6][7][8] His ancestral home is in De'an County, Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province in Southern China.[9][10] During the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War, he moved with his family and attended school in many places, including Hunan, Chongqing, Hankou and Nanjing.[9]

He graduated from Southwest Agricultural College (now part of Southwest University) in 1953.

Yuan began his teaching career at the Anjiang Agricultural School, Hunan Province.[11] In the 1960s he had the idea of hybridizing rice to increase its yield after reading of similar research that was underway successfully in maize and sorghum.[12] Undertaking this hybridization was important because the first generation of hybrids is typically more vigorous and productive than either parent.[11]

For the rest of his life Yuan devoted himself to the research and development of better rice varieties.

The biggest problem was that rice is a self-pollinating plant. Hybridization requires separate male and female plants as parents. The small rice flowers contain both male and female parts. Although the male parts can be removed, carefully, by hand (to produce female-only flowers), this is not practical on a large scale. It was thus difficult to produce hybrid rice in large quantities. In 1961 he spotted a seed-head of wild hybrid rice.[11] By 1964, Yuan hypothesized that naturally-mutated male-sterile rice could exist and could be used for the creation of new hybrid rice varieties. He and a student spent the summer searching for male sterile rice plants. Two years later he reported in a scientific publication[13] that he had found a few individuals of male-sterile rice with potential for production of hybrid rice.[11] Subsequent experiments proved his original hypothesis feasible, which proved to be his most important contribution to hybrid rice.[11]

Yuan Longping in 1953 in Southwest University. Yuan is in the back row, third from the left.

Yuan Longping in 1962

Yuan went on to solve more problems over the next decades to achieve higher yielding hybrid rice. This took more than a decade.[12] The first experimental hybrid rice did not show any significant advantage over commonly grown varieties, so Yuan suggested crossbreeding cultivated rice varieties with ones growing wild in the countryside.[14] In 1970, beside a railway line in Hainan, he and his team found a particularly important wild variety.[14] Using this one within a breeding programme resulted in varieties with yields improved by 20 - 30% in the late 1970s.[14] For this achievement, Yuan Longping was dubbed the "Father of Hybrid Rice."[5]

At present, as much as 50 percent of China's total number of rice paddies grow Yuan Longping's hybrid rice and these hybrid rice paddies yield 60 percent of the total rice production in China.[5] China's total rice output rose from 56.9 million tons in 1950 to 194.7 million tons in 2017.[14] The annual yield increase is enough to feed 70 million additional people.[15]

The "Super Rice" Yuan worked on improving showed a 30 percent higher yield, compared to common rice, with a record yield of 17,055 kilograms per hectare being registered in Yongsheng County in Yunnan Province in 1999.[15]

In January 2014, Yuan said in an interview that genetically modified food would be the future direction of food and that he had been working on genetic modification of rice.[16]

Yuan was both professionally and personally interested on rice production. He spent a majority of his time in the field, rather than staying confined in a lab or publishing papers. As such, he played a large role in Chinese agriculture by mentoring and leading others in the field, which helped foster future achievements in Chinese agriculture.[8]

In 1979, his technique for hybrid rice was introduced into the United States, making it the first case of intellectual property rights transfer in the history of the People's Republic of China.

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.

Yuan advocated for sharing the success of his breakthroughs with other nations. He and his team donated crucial rice strains to the International Rice Research Institute in 1980. These donated strains were used to create hybrid rice strains that could sustain and grow in tropical countries to help their food supply chains. In addition to donating important rice strains, Yuan and his team taught farmers in other countries to grow and cultivate hybrid rice.[8]

At present, the annual planting area of hybrid rice in China is about 230 million acres, accounting for 50% of the total rice planting area, and the output accounts for 57% of the total rice production. This increases the country's grain production by more than 20 billion kilograms every year, which is equivalent to the annual total grain production of a medium-sized province. Due to the great success of hybrid rice, he has won eight international awards, including the only National Special Invention Award and the UNESCO "Science Award", and is known as the "Father of Hybrid Rice" internationally.[21]

Four asteroids and a college in China have been named after him. The minor planet 8117 Yuanlongping was also named after him.[22]

For his achievement, Yuan was awarded the 2011 Mahathir Science Award. The award was presented by Malaysian former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.[23][24]

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.[5]

He was the Director-General of the China National Hybrid Rice R&D Center and appointed Professor at Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha.[25] He was a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2006) and the 2006 CPPCC.[25]

Yuan worked as the chief consultant for the FAO in 1991.[25]

Yuan married one of his students, Deng Ze (邓则) in 1964.[26] They had three sons, among them Yuan Ding'an (袁定安) and Yuan Dingjiang (袁定江).[27][28]

Activities in memory of Yuan Longping

Flowers as well as rice given by the public outside Xiangya Hospital after the death of Yuan.

People came to the Changsha Mingyangshan Funeral Parlour to mourn Yuan Longping, on 23 May 2021.

On March 10, 2021, Yuan Longping collapsed at his hybrid rice research base in Sanya. On April 7, he was transferred to Changsha, Hunan Province for treatment.[29] At 13:07 on May 22, Yuan Longping died of multiple organ failure at Xiangya Hospital of Central South University (中南大学湘雅医院).[4][30] Considered a national hero,[8] tens of thousands of people sent flowers to the funeral home.[8]

• The man who puts an end to hunger: Yuan Longping, "Father of Hybrid Rice". Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. 2007. ISBN 9787119051093.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Yuan Longping.

• Yuan Longping -- Father of Hybrid Rice (2001-03-05)
• Yuan Longping -- Remembrance by Chen Lei, Translation by Rainy Liu (2021-06-01)