Word: borlaug
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Shortly after he took charge of the Rockefeller Foundation's wheat-improvement program in Mexico 26 years ago, a young American plant pathologist named Norman E. Borlaug began a momentous series of cross-breeding experiments. With the germ plasm of plants from four different countries, he succeeded in developing a remarkable new kind of wheat that was able to flourish in all of Mexico's widely varied growing conditions. His work quickly put Mexico on the road to self-sufficiency in wheat production. But it had an even more important result: it sowed the seeds of the Green...
Last week, as the man most responsible for that jump, the onetime Iowa farm boy was awarded the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. Characteristically, Borlaug was in the wheatfields near Atizapán, Mexico, when he heard the news about the $78,000 prize. "Somebody has made a mistake," he insisted. When he was finally convinced, he delayed meeting reporters until he had completed his day's work: carefully checking his latest plantings, including a new type of "triple dwarf" wheat...
...impossible for me to nominate one Man of the Year, so I'll have to name two: Dr. Norman Borlaug, the agricultural scientist who has developed a dwarf wheat that can give mankind a 20-year respite from famine; and Dr. Alan Guttmacher, head of Planned Parenthood-World Popu lation, which hopes to avert this famine by curtailing population growth...