Interpretation of the Story of Yuan Longping and Hybrid Rice
Yuan Longping, the "father of hybrid rice", celebrated his 90th birthday on August 9th, 20 19, and realized his wish of "one thousand kilograms per mu". As we all know, Yuan Longping has made outstanding contributions to hybrid rice in China, feeding 654.38+03 billion people in China, and now it is far more than 654.38+03 billion. But all we know about him is the above sentence and a simple face of an old farmer.
Perhaps the source of many great biographies is to contribute to the country and the nation, such as Zhou Enlai, who studied for the rise of the nation; For example, Lu Xun gave up medicine and went to literature to save the country, but the story of the same great Yuan Longping is different, which seems more natural and doomed.
The relationship between Yuan Longping and Rice began with a rural teacher. Before he became a rural teacher, he almost became an air force or a national athlete.
Yuan Longping studied in Southwest Agricultural College. He is very active and likes freedom. Outdoor activities attract him more than diligent research in the house. At that time, during the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, the New China government organized college students to sign up for the army. Yuan Longping signed up, not only passed all 36 tests, but also was elected as the Air Force. Before attending the air force preparatory class, I was told that the situation ahead had improved and all the college students who joined the army had been returned.
It doesn't matter if the air force can't do it. In the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China, all aspects of the country needed talents. That's right. In the same year, Yuan Longping participated in the Southwest Swimming Trials, and the top three in the competition could enter the national swimming team. Yuan Longping has been good at swimming since he was a child. He dared to cross the Yangtze River before he was 10 years old. When I was studying in Wuhan, I participated in the swimming competition held in Hubei Province and won the first place in Hankou District and the second place in the province. With his strength, he is sure to enter the national swimming team, but unfortunately, the night before the competition, he only got the fourth place because he was greedy for Chengdu snacks and had a stomachache the next day.
The above two things seem to be coincidental. It seems that God intends to keep Yuan Longping, asking him to contribute to the cause of agriculture and solve the problem of food and clothing in China and even the world.
Do you think that all the misfortunes that pass by in the world will be arranged by God?
1In August, 953, Yuan Longping, who failed to seize the first two opportunities, was assigned to teach at Anjiang Agricultural School in Anjiang Town, Qianyang County, Hunan Province after graduating with excellent results. Anjiang Agricultural School, four kilometers away from the town, is located in a remote place. Yuan Longping stayed for 16 years, and his students and these experimental fields accompanied him every day.
Perhaps many people think that Yuan Longping looks no different from an ordinary farmer, but he was born in a well-off intellectual family. My mother was a primary school teacher and my father was an official in the Republic of China. His father graduated from the Literature Department of Central South University and has a patriotic heart. During his stay in War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, he went to transport arms. Father's patriotism is also deeply buried in Yuan Longping's heart. New China has just been established, and there are famines everywhere. When Yuan Longping saw people starving to death, he secretly made up his mind to solve the food problem in China.
Ambition is not established at an early age, and a warm-blooded heart is not cultivated deliberately, but is heard. What kind of person you want your child to be, you must first make yourself what kind of person you want to be.
1960, in the experimental field in front of the classroom, Yuan Longping accidentally found that more than a dozen rice plants were about 20 centimeters taller than ordinary rice, and they were big and had many grains, which opened the road of hybrid rice in Yuan Longping. The United States and Japan began to invest a lot of money in rice hybridization research in the 1920s, but for decades, they found nothing and thought that rice had no heterosis. But Yuan Longping doesn't think so. He bends down to work in the fields every day to pick up rice.
After 6 years from 1964 to 1980 and 16, Yuan Longping finally carefully cultivated 700 male sterile plants of artificial hybrid rice. Yuan Longping scattered all 700 seeds in the experimental field, and by May, the seedlings had sprouted. Yuan Longping is very pleased. But I did not expect to see such a scene one morning. All 700 seedlings were destroyed by roots and the fields were trampled to pieces. Long Yuan collapsed. It took 16 years to plant these 700 male sterile plants, and they were screened out in the first phase of cultivation. They were destroyed overnight, which was really heartbreaking. I still don't know which villain did it.
Yuan Longping was disappointed, but what he decided to do was to continue, even if he encountered great difficulties, even if he had to start all over again. He has given up hope on the experimental field in front of him, left Jiang 'an Agricultural School and moved to rice fields all over the country.
After two years of turmoil, we still can't find a suitable male sterile plant, which undoubtedly adds a layer of fog to the original pain. Although the situation is not optimistic, he still works hard and thinks it is still rice.
Once, an earthquake of magnitude 7.2 occurred in Yunnan, and the house was only 100 kilometers away from the earthquake center. Everyone else rushed out, only he and his assistants rushed back to the research room to rescue the seedlings. The house was destroyed by the earthquake, so I can't live in it. I had to live on the basketball court for three months. Seeing that the seeds were about to fall to the ground, the temperature of the teeth was not enough. Yuan Longping tied the seeds to his waist, warmed them with his body temperature, and so he fell back.
After analyzing many failed experiments, Long Yuan finally targeted Nanhong Farm in Hainan. A kind of "fake food" which is considered useless by local people and has small and withered ears is exactly what Yuan Longping is looking for. This kind of male sterile plant is a wild rice with iodine deficiency pollen abortion, which is called "wild abortion" and later becomes the female parent of all hybrid rice.
"Fake food" is grass in others' eyes, but Yuan Longping is a treasure at first sight. It can be seen that swift horses are common, but Bole is not common.
After the success of hybrid rice research in Yuan Longping, it not only helped the country to increase its grain output, but also developed cadmium-free heavy metal rice on 20 17, which largely helped Japan solve the problem of "rickets". What is even more shocking is that in 20 18, it helped Dubai grow rice in a tropical desert, and the world's first desert planting was successful, with an yield of 500 kilograms per mu.
Throughout the story of Yuan Longping and hybrid rice, it can be said that Yuan Longping had no dream of saving the world, and almost joined the Air Force and the national swimming team, but under the arrangement of fate, he overcame difficulties step by step and made achievements. If you encounter it, it should be safe. The key point is to admire the research spirit of scientists.
The second chapter reads the story of Yuan Longping and hybrid rice.
1960 Rare natural and man-made disasters brought severe food famine, and one by one patients with sallow edema fell down ... Yuan Longping's 5-foot body also directly experienced the pain of hunger.
Yuan Longping witnessed the cruel reality, tossing and turning, unable to sleep. He thought of the old society, where people were exploited and oppressed by the ruling class, suffered from war, lacked food and clothing, and were displaced. Today, people are the masters of their own affairs, but they are still not free from the threat of hunger. He is determined to give full play to his intelligence and expertise, and use the professional knowledge he has learned to cultivate new rice varieties with yield of 800 kg/mu, 1000 kg and 2000 kg/mu as soon as possible, so as to greatly increase the grain yield and overcome hunger with agricultural science and technology.
Yuan Longping is in favor of such a formula: knowledge+sweat+inspiration+opportunity = success.
Based on his profound understanding of genetics, he carefully observed and statistically analyzed the degraded plants in the experimental field, which not only proved that the rice plants that stood out were "natural hybrid rice", but also fully proved that rice had obvious heterosis from the good growth of its first generation. The experimental results convinced him that the research of hybrid rice is promising!
However, hybrid rice is a world problem. Because rice is a hermaphrodite crop, it is difficult to remove the male flowers one by one for hybridization. In this way, before crossing with other varieties, it is necessary to cultivate a male sterile rice plant, that is, a male sterile line. This is a worldwide problem. Yuan Longping went ahead in spite of difficulties. He believes that the original parents of male sterile lines are naturally mutated male sterile plants and can also exist naturally. There are many varieties of wild rice and cultivated rice in China, and the seed resources are rich. This is a free rice kingdom. "If foreign countries are not successful, China people may not be successful."
Yuan Longping took his legs and walked into the vast green sea of rice, looking for a kind of rice male sterile plant that had never been seen and reported in Chinese and foreign materials. As time went by, Yuan Longping stood in the scorching sun overhead, with his feet in the mud, hunched over, and searched ear by ear. Many things happen. Finally, on the fourth day of/kloc-0, a plant with male flowers and strange characters was discovered. Yuan Longping was ecstatic.
From June 1964 to July 1965, he and his wife Deng Ze discovered six more male sterile plants. When mature, the seeds of the first generation of naturally pollinated male sterile materials are harvested respectively. After two spring and autumn experiments and the analysis of scientific data, the first important paper, Rice Male Sterility, was written and published in the fourth issue of Science Bulletin, volume 1966. It is also predicted that through further breeding, male sterile lines, maintainer lines (maintaining male sterility in offspring) and restorer lines (restoring male fertility) can be obtained, and the three lines can be matched, making it possible to make use of the advantages of the first generation of hybrid rice, which will bring about large-scale and large-scale agricultural production increase. The publication of this important paper was regarded by some colleagues as the marching horn of "blowing the second green revolution".
After eight years of hard work, 1974 successfully prepared seeds and determined its advantages. 1975, with the support of Hunan provincial party Committee and provincial government, large-scale seed production was successful, and seeds were prepared for large-scale popularization in the following year, which made the research results enter the stage of large-scale popularization.
1in the winter of 975, the State Council made a decision to rapidly expand trial planting and popularize hybrid rice in large quantities. The state has invested a lot of manpower, material resources and financial resources to carry out breeding and seed production three times a year, and promoted it at the fastest speed. 1976 fixed-point demonstration of 2.08 million mu, the national application of production. By 1988, the area of hybrid rice in China was1940,000 mu, accounting for 39.6% of the rice area, while the total output accounted for 18.5%. In the year of 10, the total planting area of hybrid rice in China was12.56 million mu, and the total output value increased by10 billion kilograms, which achieved great economic and social benefits. The masses praised that the problem of eating was solved by two "flats", one by the policy of the top of the CPC Central Committee and the other by the hybrid rice in Yuan Longping. People spoke the minds of hundreds of millions of farmers in China in plain language.
With the successful planting of hybrid rice and its large-scale popularization in China, Yuan Longping became famous in one fell swoop. In the face of achievements and honors, Yuan Longping publicly claimed that the shortcomings of hybrid rice cultivated at this stage are "three more and three less", that is, "the previous strength is more than enough, and the stamina is insufficient; Too many tillers and insufficient panicles; There are more ears and fewer seeds, so the organization assistant takes measures from breeding and cultivation.
In the early 1980s, facing the worldwide famine, Yuan Longping once again had an amazing idea, and boldly put forward the topic of super-high yield breeding of hybrid rice, trying to solve the hunger problem in a wider range.
1985 with a strong sense of responsibility, Yuan Longping published the article "Discussion on Super-high-yield Breeding of Hybrid Rice", and put forward four ways to cultivate super-high-yield combinations with strong advantages, among which nuclear hybrids were the focus. However, many years of breeding practice did not produce a combination that met the production requirements. He decisively and quickly jumped out of the study of nuclear-cytoplasmic hybrids and explored new and more promising research fields.
With rich imagination, keen intuition and bold creative spirit, Yuan Longping conscientiously summed up the century-old history of crop breeding and the 20-year experience of "three-line hybrid rice" breeding, as well as the rich breeding materials he had mastered. 1987, he put forward the "strategic thinking of hybrid rice breeding" and foresaw two strategic development stages of hybrid rice, namely, the utilization of interspecific heterosis based on three-line method. Utilization of heterosis between indica and japonica subspecies based on two-line method: utilization of distant heterosis based on one-line method. This is another new peak in the development of Yuan Longping's hybrid rice theory.
Under the guidance of Yuan Longping's strategic thought, following the discovery of a sterile photoperiod-sensitive genic male sterile material in the late japonica 58 natural population in 1973, in June 1987, Li Bihu's assistant Deng Huafeng discovered a photoperiod-sensitive sterile rice in the three-line indica rice breeding material of Anjiang Agricultural School. After two years and three generations of propagation and observation in different places, the agronomic characters of this material are neat and consistent, the sterile plant rate and sterility degree both reach 100%, the sterile period is stable in Anjiang for more than 50 days, and the fertility transformation is obvious and synchronous. This new achievement has opened up a new situation of hybrid rice from "three-line method" to "two-line method" The progress of apomixis research in rice also makes the one-line method take a gratifying step in using distant heterosis. Yuan Longping is full of confidence in the prospect of hybrid rice research.
With the trial planting of hybrid rice in various countries in the world, hybrid rice has attracted worldwide attention. In recent years, Yuan Longping has been invited to give lectures, impart technology, attend academic conferences or conduct technical cooperation research in 8 countries including the Philippines, the United States, Japan, France, Britain, Italy, Egypt and Australia 19 times. Yuan Longping's hybrid rice achievements won the first special invention award since the founding of New China in 198 1, and from 1985 to 1988, it won three international science awards in just four years. Dr. Swaminathan, director of the International Rice Research Institute and former Indian Minister of Agriculture, spoke highly: "We call Mr. Yuan Longping the' father of hybrid rice' because his achievements are not only the pride of China, but also the pride of the world, and his achievements have brought good news to mankind."
Yuan Longping, from the remote Anjiang Agricultural School in Hunan Province, has grown from a young teacher in a secondary agricultural school in a mountain village to a world-renowned celebrity and ascended the throne of "Father of Hybrid Rice". The research on hybrid rice is in the ascendant, and it is developing rapidly in the direction of Yuan Longping's new strategic concept! ?
The third chapter reads the story of Yuan Longping and hybrid rice.
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On the afternoon of June 5438+ 10, 2004, Yuan Longping was invited to give a report on the research progress of super hybrid rice in China for the teachers and students of the University of Iowa. After a long applause, the president of the University of Iowa asked the students to ask questions.
An international student from China asked: Although we are abroad, we always pay attention to domestic news. We have long been glad to hear that you have made outstanding contributions to our country, and we have also learned some background materials about you. We want to know, did you like agriculture since you were a child?
Yuan Longping replied cheerfully: I was very playful and had many hobbies when I was a child. I study, listen carefully to the courses I am interested in and get high marks in the exam; For courses that you are not interested in, just get three points and pass. When I graduated from college, my classmates gave me an appraisal-hobby: freedom; Specialty: slow. Freedom is slow, and I am so lonely. As for learning agriculture, it originated from an accidental opportunity. In the first grade of primary school, on an outing, the teacher took us to visit a private gardening field. I see the peaches on the tree are red, the grapes are in clusters, and the flowers are beautiful. At that time, I watched the movie Modern Times starring Chaplin. There is a scene in the film with grapes outside the window. The impressions of the two are overlapping. I think it's really rural. I want to learn agriculture when I grow up. If the teacher had taken us to the real countryside, which was bitter, poor and dirty, then I would definitely not have studied agriculture.
There was a burst of laughter in the audience, applauding the frankness and directness of this great scientist. He made no secret of the advantages and disadvantages of his personality, which made Chinese and foreign college students feel more respectable and amiable, and completely and truly demonstrated the perfect unity of the greatness and the ordinary of this scientist.
In this way, his academic report ended in a simple and warm atmosphere.
Chapter 4 read the story of Yuan Longping and hybrid rice.
Honor does not belong to me personally, but to the whole of China.
After Yuan Longping returned from numerous awards, a reporter asked him: What do you think of your contribution?
He said quietly: This is not my personal honor, but our honor in China. I am just a leader and a representative of a discipline. Let me tell a story:1In August, 1997, I went to Mexico to attend the international symposium on crop genetics and heterosis utilization, and was awarded the honorary title of pioneer scientist. More than 600 scientists from more than 60 countries attended the meeting, of which 12 came from China. Because of my visa, I went two days late and arrived in the afternoon of the first day of the ceremony. I arrived, 12. The Chinese were overjoyed and said, Miss Yuan, you are the last one. We are anxious. Since you came, our position has improved. Because among the five people who were awarded the title of pioneer scientist, the other four were Americans. At that moment, I deeply realized that honor belongs not to me personally, but to the whole of China. ?
Chapter 5 read the story of Yuan Longping and hybrid rice.
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Ride a motorcycle to the experimental field
Yuan Longping has tens of millions of dollars in scientific research funds, but his life is extremely simple.
He has developed the habit of going to the field for many years, and whenever he has time, he goes to the experimental field to observe and breathe the breath of the field. If the success of his career has brought any change to his life, it is that since the 1980s, his means of transportation to the experimental field has changed from the initial bicycle to a motorcycle. He thinks it's light and fast. Unexpectedly, playing motorcycles and racing cars has become a great pleasure in his life.
The seedlings in the field faded, sprouted, blossomed and grew very strong. He got on the motorcycle, jumped onto the road, turned into the path, slipped onto the ridge, and his lithe figure flashed in the green or golden rice fields. For more than ten years, he has changed eight or nine motorcycles of different brands. Today, although he is over 70 years old, he still often rides a motorcycle to work in the fields.
At the end of 200 1, Yuan Longping bought a Sail brand family car under the persuasion of a friend. A friend told him that riding a motorcycle is wrapped in iron, driving a car is wrapped in iron, or driving a car is safer. He learned to drive with great interest and felt good. Sometimes, he drives his car to the edge of the field. He also said with a smile that he was going to take a driver's license test.