Yuan Longping

Yuan Longping
Yuan Longping in 1962
Native name	袁隆平
Born	(1930-09-07) September 7, 1930 (age 86) Beijing
Residence	Changsha, Hunan
Nationality	Chinese
Education	High School Affiliated to Nanjing Normal University
Alma mater	Southwest University
Occupation	agricultural scientist
Years active	1960 - present
Organization	Hunan Agricultural University
Known for	hybrid rice
Spouse(s)	Deng Zhe (m. 1964)
Children	Yuan Ding'an Yuan Dingjiang
Parent(s)	Yuan Xinglie Hua Jing
Awards	State Preeminent Science and Technology Award 2001 Wolf Prize in Agriculture 2004 World Food Prize 2004 Confucius Peace Prize 2012

Yuan Longping (Chinese: 袁隆平; pinyin: Yuán Lóngpíng; born September 7, 1930) is a Chinese agricultural scientist and educator, known for developing the first hybrid rice varieties in the 1970s.

Hybrid rice has since been grown in dozens of countries in Africa, America, and Asia—providing a robust food source in high famine risk areas. For his contributions, Yuan is sometimes called "The Father of Hybrid Rice" by the Chinese media.

Yuan was born in Beijing, China in 1930. In an era of wars, he moved with his family and attended school in many places during his childhood and youth, including Hunan, Chongqing, Hankou and Nanjing whose ancestral home was in Dean Country, Jiujiang City, Jiangxi Province.

He graduated from the Southwest Agriculture Institute in 1953 and began his teaching career at an agriculture school in Anjiang, Hunan Province.

He came up with an idea for hybridizing rice in the 1960s, when a series of natural disasters and inappropriate policies (the Great Leap Forward) had plunged China into an unprecedented famine that caused many deaths.

Since then, Yuan has devoted himself to the research and development of a better rice breed. In 1964, he happened to find a natural hybrid rice plant that had obvious advantages over others. Greatly encouraged, he began to study the elements of this particular type.

The biggest problem by then, was having no known method to reproduce hybrid rice in mass quantities, and that was what Yuan set out to solve. In 1964, Yuan created his theory of using the probably-existing naturally-mutated male-sterile rice individuals for the creation of reproductive hybrid rice species, and in two years he managed to find a few individuals of such male-sterile rice that he predicted could be used for his research. Subsequent experiments proved his theory feasible, which was his most important contribution on hybrid rice.