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Yuan Longping has died
- watersb 5y agoFather of hybrid rice. Saved millions of people from chronic hunger and famine. I was just talking about him yesterday.
- FooBarWidget 5y agoMany people are grateful to him for his contributions in fighting famine. When his body was transported, many people ran on the streets, shouting to the cars. Here's a video: https://twitter.com/Jingjing_Li/status/1396454905200533509 https://twitter.com/Jingjing_Li/status/1396454905200533509
- zhte415 5y agoFor context, in an event like this honking car horns is a sign of respect. Same as the remembrance of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake when all traffic stopped and blew their horns.
- mech422 5y agoforgive my ignorance...but I thought a guy at the USDA developed the hybrid rice used in a lot of asia? Ahh - Dr. Borlaug did wheat it appears: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
- nix23 5y agoYes the First generation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_rice#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_rice#History
- clydethefrog 5y agoQuoting the NYT obituary: Mr. Yuan’s research arguably had effects at least as broad, since rice is the main grain for half the world’s population and wheat for a third.
- kragen 5y agoAlso Borlaug did it mostly in Mexico.
- pm90 5y agoHe (or his work) was adapted for India spurring the “Green Revolution” which was responsible for ending chronic food shortages in India. Absolutely massive impact made by one man. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/green-revolution-norman-borlaug-race-to-fight-global-hunger/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/green-r...
- mech422 5y agoYeah - I think I was confusing India and China...And wheat and rice. Sad that people that have had such a profound impact on the world, in such good ways, are relatively unknown.
- kragen 5y agoYou may be interested in https://gitlab.com/kragen/derctuo/blob/master/markdown/hacker-calendar.md https://gitlab.com/kragen/derctuo/blob/master/markdown/hacke..., although it's pretty incomplete. Yuan isn't on there, for example.
- mech422 5y agoGahh....Noo...I'll never finish looking all that up :-P Thanks - there's some interesting stuff there /me runs off to google "House of Wisdom"
- mech422 5y agoWow - Dr. Longping sounds like incredible individual. Does anyone have any recomendations for good articles/books about him?
- FooBarWidget 5y agoNew York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/23/world/asia/yuan-longping-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/23/world/asia/yuan-longping-... Here's a speech he gave a few years ago: https://youtu.be/0ts9RqOKaBM https://youtu.be/0ts9RqOKaBM
- mech422 5y agoThanks! the speech was interesting
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nanis 5y agoThe Wikipedia entry reads like a CCP release. See also http://www.china.org.cn/english/2001/Mar/8452.htm http://www.china.org.cn/english/2001/Mar/8452.htm and https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/95thcpc/2016-06/16/content_25732129.htm https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/95thcpc/2016-06/16/conte... While this is nothing to shake a stick at: > The "Super Rice" Yuan is now working on yields are 30 percent higher than those of common rice. The famines experienced by the communist regimes were not due to the quality of available breeds, but simply due to the lack of functioning price signals and the fact that production was directed by central authorities. See also https://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article/19/3/42/13671/Political-Famines-in-the-USSR-and-China-A https://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article/19/3/42/13671/Political-...
- nanis 5y agoWhy the downvotes? The Wikipedia link confers a degree of assumption of neutrality even though it reads exactly like the content in one of those `.cn` posts. So, why not go to the source.
- ethbr0 5y agoBecause there's a blurb about the Great Famine in the Wikipedia page itself. So it feels like muckraking to clutter someone's obituary notice with observations about their government's policies.
- nanis 5y ago> muckraking to clutter someone's obituary notice Edited to add: In theory, one might think there ought to be a difference between an obituary and a encyclopedia entry. This is more shrine to a person as opposed to a less propagandist, more objective account. The implications of the CCP line, the Wikipedia article, and the tone here is that better rice was what was needed to avoid famine. The reality is with property rights, proper prices, without central planning, there would not have been a famine. Maybe he is as great as people claim ... Or, maybe his reputation is manufactured _ex post facto_ to diminish the role of the ideology in causing the disaster. As for saving people from hunger elsewhere, people in the Sudan or Yemen or Ethiopia have not been dying because they planted the inferior crop.
- tedk-42 5y agoI wish there was a reference for this statement in wikipedia: >>> 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.
- jhvkjhk 5y agoIt seems like a company called IRRI bought his technique in 1979, but I can’t find accurate source： > IRRI became involved in hybrid rice research in 1979 https://www.irri.org/hybrid-rice https://www.irri.org/hybrid-rice > in 1979 ... my aid Li Yuanqing and I are working in a IRRI experimental plot... from Yuan’s oral autobiography https://books.google.com/books?id=AVp_DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT283&lpg=PT283&dq=IRRI+Yuan+Longping+1979&source=bl&ots=371E0Eq2rg&sig=ACfU3U3Zv3TmZTP_m4s7uj4ASwMDRrJlIA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjGprvvlOLwAhVfFjQIHaneCaYQ6AEwCXoECAcQAw&authuser=1#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=AVp_DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT283&lpg=... > IRRI ... halted its research the following year, only restarting it in 1979 after China had fired up international interest by commercializing the technology. from a journal called Rice Today(the first footnote of https://www.irri.org/hybrid-rice https://www.irri.org/hybrid-rice) EDIT: no, IRRI is a Philippine company.
- oefrha 5y agoThe International Rice Research Institute is an international nonprofit research and educational institute headquartered in Philippines, not “a Philippine company”.
- temp8964 5y agoBut this is China, the CCP has full control of the media. Quote the Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine > The Great Chinese Famine (Chinese: 三年大饥荒, "three years of great famine") was a period between 1959 and 1961 in the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC) characterized by widespread famine.[1][2][3][4][5] Some scholars have also included the years 1958 or 1962.[6][7][8][9] The Great Chinese Famine is widely regarded as the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million).[3][4][5][10][11][12][13][14][15] > The major contributing factors in the famine were the policies of the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962) and people's communes, such as inefficient distribution of food due to the planned economy, requiring the use of poor agricultural techniques, the Four Pests Campaign that reduced bird populations (which disrupted the ecosystem), over-reporting of grain production (which was actually decreasing), and ordering millions of farmers to switch to iron and steel production.[3][5][7][12][14][16] During the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in early 1962, Liu Shaoqi, the second Chairman of the PRC, formally attributed 30% of the famine to natural disasters and 70% to man-made errors ("三分天灾, 七分人祸").[7][17][18] After the launch of Reforms and Opening Up, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officially stated in June 1981 that the famine was mainly due to the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward as well as the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in addition to some natural disasters and the Sino-Soviet split.[1][2] BTW: Wikipedia is banned in China.
- cowsandmilk 5y agoNot sure what you are trying to say here. As mentioned in the tweet, he is revered because his research truly did improve agriculture. As opposed to the previous generation of agriculture researchers that worked on the Great Leap Forward that caused the famine.
- temp8964 5y ago"the previous generation of agriculture researchers that worked on the Great Leap Forward that caused the famine"? What the hell are you talking about? What do you mean "agriculture researchers that worked on the Great Leap Forward"?
- mothsonasloth 5y agoYou could say his TTL was set too low Yes it was a bad joke
- einpoklum 5y agoVery interesting. However, the fact that you can't replant hybrid rice, and are dependent on contiuous breeding of first-generation hybrids, makes it potentially problematic politically. A state or privately-owned source of hybrids can have rice cultivating farmers "by the balls" so to speak.
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- amelius 5y ago"Uncle Ben's" should have been "Dr. Longping's"
- EastToWest 5y agoMinor correction, his family name is Yuan. Longping is his given name.
- dnautics 5y agoI presume Ben is not his family name. Some doctors like to be called by their first name, e.g. Dr Drew
- m0llusk 5y agoThe Uncle Ben brand is intended for the US market and as such is treated so that the grains are less likely to stick together. This isn't the kind of thing that Dr. Longping was interested in.
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- Aperocky 5y agoYou know the ideological crusaders has gone overboard when there are this amount of controversy when a scientist that works on rice has died. It's ridiculous, he isn't even a CCP member. Y'all should be ashamed of yourself to put any amount of ideology to someone whose whole work in life is to produce more food, so people don't starve.
- dang 5y agoThis is a case of the contrarian dynamic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22%20objection%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... I agree with you that the commenters who took the thread into nationalistic and ideological flamewar have broken the site guidelines shamefully, but this does not characterize the thread, and certainly not the community. The opposite is the case, which is how a comment like yours, castigating the comments, ends up in an ironic position at the top of the thread. There are many explanations at the above link. I'm going to mark this subthread off topic now.
- 29athrowaway 5y agoI had not heard about hybrid rice until now. It is cool that it has a 20% to 30% higher yield than common rice. I had heard about "golden rice", which is a genetically modified rice that produces beta carotene. I don't know what happened to it, though.
- contingencies 5y agoThis guy is cool: being raised by teachers, spending time in nature and avoiding politics is pretty astute. What a shame he didn't live to see the era where open source observations on iNaturalist et al could allow him to do international field work by proxy in his old age. I think we will hang a picture of him in our company office (foodtech robotics in China). He really picked an interesting retirement spot: Hainan is a tropical island known for surfing, sailing, obtaining US spy planes, former cultural and ethnographic diversity including Austronesian and Tai, an influx of Russians to the point where the street signs are in bizzarro alt-Blacksea cyrillic, and alleged tests of GFW-free internet in China. The powers that be are giving lip service to setting it up as an HK-alternative investment gateway to China with proximity to SEA, perhaps largely just to spite HK.
- djbebs 5y agoI do wonder, it seems like a lot of his most important experiments and hybridization attempts were quite low tech compared to what I would have expected. I wonder if it would be fairly accessible to making ones own hybrids in a backyard garden type scenario? Does anyone have any experience knowledge on that sort of thing?