Norman Borlaug, 1914-2009
Robert X. Cringely
bob at cringely.com
Mon Sep 14 01:30:09 PDT 2009
I didn't know Norman Borlaug. I do know Tom Brokaw, who is a fine
person, a hard worker, and quite without the ego that afflicts many in
his profession. If you think Tom Brokaw represents a "moral sewer"
then I think you are a very poor judge of character. Either that or
you simply like to insult people you don't know.
Bob Cringely
At 9:26 AM -0400 9/13/09, R.A. Hettinga wrote:
> A moral giant died yesterday, the greatest humanitarian of the 20th
> century.
>
> A man who directly saved more people (245 million) from starvation <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
> > than Lenin and Stalin & Co. (61,911,000), Hitler (20,946,000), Mao
> & Co. (77,277,000), and Pol Pot (2,035,000) killed altogether <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide
> >.
>
> If I were to guess, I'd figure there are at least a billion people
> standing on the planet right now who would not be alive if this man
> had not lived.
>
> Borlaug delivered not mere bags of surplus gruel shipped by guilty
> consciences in the "developed" world. Or, much worse, precious food
> stolen from the mouths of other starving people in communist
> countries and used as some kind of demented political weapon. Food
> left to rot on the docks for the rats to eat.
>
> Borlaug delivered *better* food, developed for local conditions,
> *grown* locally, and *sold* locally by farmers in a free market -- a
> condition which Borlaug personally demanded for the use of his
> hybrid seeds.
>
>
> Because of Norman Borlaug there is no famine in all the places
> haunted by starvation when I was a child: Mexico, India, East Asia,
> Africa, even China. The only places where people face wholesale
> starvation now are places where democidal politicians deliberately
> *cause* famine: North Korea, Burma, Congo, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Cuba and
> the Sudan. And the only people who face starvation in the future
> will be those subject to democidal thugs and fools.
>
> A moral monument of a man. A inspiration to free human beings
> everywhere. A man who now belongs to history.
>
>
> Cheers,
> RAH
> Who, quite by accident, saw Borlaug get yet another honorary degree
> at a nephew's graduation a while back -- along with Tom Brokaw, who
> actually did the commencement address. Talk about going from a moral
> sewer to a towering skyscraper in the space of a single dais...
>
>
> --------
>
> <http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090913/ap_on_re_us/us_obit_borlaug/
> print>
>
> Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug dies at 95
>
> By MATT CURRY and BETSY BLANEY, Associated Press Writers
> September 13, 2009
>
> DALLAS - Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, the father of the
> "green revolution" who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in
> combating world hunger and saving hundreds of millions of lives,
> died Saturday in Texas, a Texas A&M University spokeswoman said. He
> was 95.
>
> Borlaug died just before 11 p.m. Saturday at his home in Dallas from
> complications of cancer, said school spokeswoman Kathleen Phillips.
> Phillips said Borlaug's granddaughter told her about his death.
> Borlaug was a distinguished professor at the university in College
> Station.
>
> The Nobel committee honored Borlaug in 1970 for his contributions to
> high-yield crop varieties and bringing other agricultural
> innovations to the developing world. Many experts credit the green
> revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the
> 20th century and saving perhaps 1 billion lives.
>
> Thanks to the green revolution, world food production more than
> doubled between 1960 and 1990. In Pakistan and India, two of the
> nations that benefited most from the new crop varieties, grain
> yields more than quadrupled over the period.
>
> "We would like his life to be a model for making a difference in the
> lives of others and to bring about efforts to end human misery for
> all mankind," his children said in a statement. "One of his favorite
> quotes was, 'Reach for the stars. Although you will never touch
> them, if you reach hard enough, you will find that you get a little
> 'star dust' on you in the process.'"
>
> Equal parts scientist and humanitarian, the Iowa-born Borlaug
> realized improved crop varieties were just part of the answer, and
> pressed governments for farmer-friendly economic policies and
> improved infrastructure to make markets accessible. A 2006 book
> about Borlaug is titled "The Man Who Fed the World."
>
> "He has probably done more and is known by fewer people than anybody
> that has done that much," said Dr. Ed Runge, retired head of Texas
> A&M University's Department of Soil and Crop Sciences and a close
> friend who persuaded Borlaug teach at the school. "He made the world
> a better place - a much better place. He had people helping him, but
> he was the driving force."
>
> Borlaug began the work that led to his Nobel in Mexico at the end of
> World War II. There he used innovative breeding techniques to
> produce disease-resistant varieties of wheat that produced much more
> grain than traditional strains.
>
> He and others later took those varieties and similarly improved
> strains of rice and corn to Asia, the Middle East, South America and
> Africa.
>
> "More than any other single person of his age, he has helped to
> provide bread for a hungry world," Nobel Peace Prize committee
> chairman Aase Lionaes said in presenting the award to Borlaug. "We
> have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also
> give the world peace."
>
> During the 1950s and 1960s, public health improvements fueled a
> population boom in underdeveloped nations, leading to concerns that
> agricultural systems could not keep up with growing food demand.
> Borlaug's work often is credited with expanding agriculture at just
> the moment such an increase in production was most needed.
>
> "We got this thing going quite rapidly," Borlaug told The Associated
> Press in a 2000 interview. "It came as a surprise that something
> from a Third World country like Mexico could have such an impact."
>
> His successes in the 1960s came just as books like "The Population
> Bomb" were warning readers that mass starvation was inevitable.
>
> "Three or four decades ago, when we were trying to move technology
> into India, Pakistan and China, they said nothing could be done to
> save these people, that the population had to die off," he said in
> 2004.
>
> Borlaug often said wheat was only a vehicle for his real interest,
> which was to improve people's lives.
>
> "We must recognize the fact that adequate food is only the first
> requisite for life," he said in his Nobel acceptance speech. "For a
> decent and humane life we must also provide an opportunity for good
> education, remunerative employment, comfortable housing, good
> clothing and effective and compassionate medical care."
>
> In Mexico, Borlaug was known both for his skill in breeding plants
> and for his eagerness to labor in the fields himself, rather than to
> let assistants do all the hard work.
>
> He remained active well into his 90s, campaigning for the use of
> biotechnology to fight hunger and working on a project to fight
> poverty and starvation in Africa by teaching new drought-resistant
> farming methods.
>
> "We still have a large number of miserable, hungry people and this
> contributes to world instability," Borlaug said in May 2006 at an
> Asian Development Bank forum in the Philippines. "Human misery is
> explosive, and you better not forget that."
>
> Norman Ernest Borlaug was born March 25, 1914, on a farm near
> Cresco, Iowa, and educated through the eighth grade in a one-room
> schoolhouse.
> "I was born out of the soil of Howard County," he said. "It was that
> black soil of the Great Depression that led me to a career in
> agriculture."
>
> He left home during the Great Depression to study forestry at the
> University of Minnesota. While there he earned himself a place in
> the university's wrestling hall of fame and met his future wife,
> whom he married in 1937. Margaret Borlaug died in 2007 at the age of
> 95.
>
> After a brief stint with the U.S. Forest Service, Norman Borlaug
> returned to the University of Minnesota for a doctoral degree in
> plant pathology. He then worked as a microbiologist for DuPont, but
> soon left for a job with the Rockefeller Foundation. Between 1944
> and 1960, Borlaug dedicated himself to increasing Mexico's wheat
> production.
>
> In 1963, Borlaug was named head of the newly formed International
> Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, where he trained thousands of
> young scientists.
> Borlaug retired as head of the center in 1979 and turned to
> university teaching, first at Cornell University and then at Texas
> A&M, which presented him with an honorary doctorate in December 2007.
>
> "You really felt really very privileged to be with him, and it
> wasn't that he was so overpowering, but he was always on,
> intellectually always engaged," said Dr. Ed Price, director of A&M's
> Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture. "He was
> always onto the issues and wanting to engage and wanting your
> opinions and thoughts."
>
> In 1986, Borlaug established the Des Moines, Iowa-based World Food
> Prize, a $250,000 award given each year to a person whose work
> improves the world's food supply. He also helped found and served as
> president of the Sasakawa Africa Foundation, an organization funded
> by Japanese billionaire Ryoichi Sasakawa to introduce the green
> revolution to sub-Saharan Africa.
>
> In July 2007, Borlaug received the Congressional Gold Medal, the
> highest civilian honor given by Congress.
>
> He is survived by daughter Jeanie Borlaug Laube and her husband Rex;
> son William Gibson Borlaug and his wife Barbie; five grandchildren
> and six great-grandchildren.
>
> They asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to the Borlaug
> International Scholars Fund. It helps students from developing
> countries pursue graduate studies or short-term experiential
> learning activities at Texas A&M or other land grant universities in
> the U.S.
>
> Plans for a memorial service to be held at Texas A&M were pending.
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