M. Porcius Cato's Blog

I remember discussing Norman Borlaug a long time ago with some folks that I knew who graduated from Warren Wilson College

 

Glad to see he's getting a nod and thanks for posting this MPC.

I first heard about Norman Borlaug three years ago while watching an episode of Penn & Teller's Showtime series: Bull's-Hit (that's as close as I can type the actual title without the little asterisks automatically appearing to disguise the naughty word). Dr. Borlaug appeared in the first season episode, titled "Eat This!", and here is what Penn & Teller had to say about him:

 

At a time when doom-sayers were hopping around saying everyone was going to starve, Norman was working. He moved to Mexico and lived among the people there until he figured out how to improve the output of the farmers. So that saved a million lives.

 

Then he packed up his family and moved to India, where in spite of a war with Pakistan, he managed to introduce new wheat strains that quadrupled their food output. So that saved another million.

 

You get it? But he wasn't done. He did the same thing with a new rice in China. He's doing the same thing in Africa -- as much of Africa as he's allowed to visit.

 

When he won the Nobel Prize in 1970, they said he had saved a billion people. That's BILLION! Carl Sagan BILLION with a B! And most of them were a different race from him.

 

Norman is the greatest human being, and you probably never heard of him.

 

Last year, Penn Jillette interviewed Dr. Borlaug on his radio show, referring to him as "my biggest hero."

 

Hero indeed. I was pleased to see Dr. Borlaug get the recognition he so richly deserved, via an admiring Penn & Teller.

 

-- Nephele

Thanks for the comments. You'd think saving a BILLION lives from starvation would be worth a little recognition, yet when you think "world hunger", whose name pops up in your mind first?

 

In any case, there's another nice interview with Borlaug over at reason.com. The basic biology research underlying Borlaug's work was done by Borlaug and his mentor Elvin Stakman at the University of Minnesota (non-MN resident tuition, $21k/year). His work in Mexico was funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations.

Had he fumbled a pass, it would have been news.