Word: revolutionized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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1944 In Mexico, American plant pathologist Norman Borlaug starts developing high-yield grains that, two decades later, will fuel the green revolution
Two hundred years ago, the English economist Thomas Malthus calculated that the world's population would soon outstrip its food-growing capacity. What he didn't anticipate was Norman Borlaug. Working in Mexico from 1944 to 1960--long before the advent of modern biotechnology--the U.S. biologist developed a hybrid...
Biologist Gregory Pincus had his hands full in 1950, when the Planned Parenthood organization gave him $30,000 and told him to develop a contraceptive that was "harmless, entirely reliable, and aesthetically satisfactory to husband and wife." Within 10 years, however, Pincus and his colleagues delivered, inventing the drug that...
The Pill and such newer, longer-lasting variants as the Norplant implant and the Depo-Provera injection do endure, however, still-effective survivors of a revolution that seems to be winding down.
He was Joseph Stalin's favorite scientist, and it's easy to see why. Lysenko was a peasant-born agronomist and Marxist ideologue who rejected Mendel's ideas because they contradicted the doctrine of dialectical materialism. He offered instead to solve the Soviet Union's chronic crop failures through a...