26 Facts About Yuan Longping

Yuan Longping was a Chinese agronomist and inventor.

Yuan Longping was a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering known for developing the first hybrid rice varieties in the 1970s, part of the Green Revolution in agriculture.

Yuan Longping was bestowed the Medal of the Republic, the highest honorary medal of the People's Republic of China, in September 2019.

Yuan Longping was born at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing, China on September 7,1930, to Yuan Longping Xinglie and Hua Jing.

Yuan Longping graduated from Southwest Agricultural College in 1953.

Yuan Longping began his teaching career at the Anjiang Agricultural School, Hunan Province.

Yuan Longping went on to solve more problems over the next decades to achieve higher yielding hybrid rice.

The first experimental hybrid rice did not show any significant advantage over commonly grown varieties, so Yuan Longping suggested crossbreeding cultivated rice varieties with ones growing wild in the countryside.

The "Super Rice" Yuan Longping worked on improving showed a 30 percent higher yield, compared to common rice, with a record yield of 17,055 kilograms per hectare being registered in Yongsheng County in Yunnan Province in 1999.

In January 2014, Yuan Longping said in an interview that genetically modified food would be the future direction of food and that he had been working on genetic modification of rice.

Yuan Longping was taught and mentored by some biologists who followed the ideas of Gregor Mendel and Thomas Hunt Morgan.

In 1962, Yuan Longping visited Bao to discuss Mendelian genetics, and Bao gave him access to up-to-date foreign scientific literature.

In 1966 Yuan Longping himself was named as a counter-revolutionary and there were plans to imprison him.

Yuan Longping did not join the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution or later.

Yuan Longping continued with similar grafting experiments on other plants, but none of the plants produced offspring with any mixtures of the beneficial traits grafted into their parents.

Yuan Longping considered applying the inheritance rules onto sweet potatoes and wheat since their fast rate of growth made them the practical solutions for the famine.

Yuan Longping observed that inbreeding reduced vigor and yield among the offspring but crossbreeding did the opposite.

Yuan Longping speculated that there would be no advantage in crossbreeding rice, and that the nature of self-pollination makes it hard to do cross breed experiments on rice on a large scale.

Yuan Longping was both professionally and personally interested in rice production.

Yuan Longping spent a majority of his time in the field, rather than staying confined in a lab or publishing papers.

Yuan Longping advocated for sharing the success of his breakthroughs with other nations.

Yuan Longping won the State Preeminent Science and Technology Award of China in 2000, the Wolf Prize in Agriculture and the World Food Prize in 2004.

Yuan Longping was a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences and the 2006 CPPCC.

Yuan Longping worked as the chief consultant for the FAO in 1991.

Yuan Longping married one of his students, Deng Ze in 1964.

On March 10,2021, Yuan Longping collapsed at his hybrid rice research base in Sanya.