Yuan Longping

At 94 years old, Yuan Longping physical status not available right now. We will update Yuan Longping's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Yuan began his teaching career at the Anjiang Agricultural School, Hunan Province. 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. Undertaking this hybridization was important because the first generation of hybrids is typically more vigorous and productive than either parent.

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. 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 that he had found a few individuals of male-sterile rice with potential for production of hybrid rice. Subsequent experiments proved his original hypothesis feasible, which proved to be his most important contribution to hybrid rice.

Yuan went on to solve more problems over the next decades to achieve higher yielding hybrid rice. This took more than a decade. 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. In 1970, beside a railway line in Hainan, he and his team found a particularly important wild variety. Using this one within a breeding programme resulted in varieties with yields improved by 20 - 30% in the late 1970s. For this achievement, Yuan Longping was dubbed the "Father of Hybrid Rice."

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. China's total rice output rose from 56.9 million tons in 1950 to 194.7 million tons in 2017. The annual yield increase is enough to feed 70 million additional people.

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.

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.

Source