Prakash
Interviews
AgBioWorld
Articles
Other
Articles
Biotech
and Religion
Media Contacts
Press
Releases
Special
Topics
Spanish
Articles
|
 |
|
|
The Nobel Prize and More Honors
The University of Minnesota College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental
Sciences
The world made Norman Borlaug a celebrity in 1970, the year he was awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize. No Midwesterner, it seems certain, has received
more honor. A list of his awards and honorary degrees runs several inches
in Who's Who, honors bestowed by a diverse set of nations: India and Pakistan,
the United States and the Soviet Union, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Argentina,
Germany.
Called the father of the green revolution, Borlaug developed high-yielding,
disease-resistant wheat plants and sent his personally trained army of
hunger fighters to spread the technology to more than 20 nations. "Through
his improvement of wheat plants," wrote the Nobel committee, "he
has created a technological breakthrough which makes it possible to abolish
hunger in the developing countries in the course of a few years."
Norman Borlaug is credited for saving more lives than any human in history.
His green revolution staved off starvation and miserable deaths for countless
numbers of people worldwide.
Since the late '50s, Borlaug has received a stream of honors from the
University of Minnesota, where he earned his bachelor's degree in forestry
and master's and Ph.D. degrees in plant pathology. The University's great
plant pathologist, the late EC Stakman, was his mentor. Now on a hill
on the St. Paul campus, connected to Stakman Hall, is a new building dedicated
in September - Borlaug Hall.
Borlaug was on hand for the dedication. He spent a week on campus, breaking
away for speaking engagements in New York and Arizona, then jetting back
to Minnesota. The University prevailed on him to deliver two public lectures
and filled his days nonstop with meetings that continued well into the
evenings. He spent two hours one afternoon in an interview for this article.
The 71-year-old Borlaug never seemed to tire. He is a man with a mission,
so he talks about it - about hunger problems, the agriculture of developing
countries, the "population monster." More reluctantly, he talks
about himself.
The Nobel Prize hit his life like a typhoon, Borlaug says, turning him
from a behind-the-scenes worker into a very public person. The change
was obvious from the day the prize was announced. That day, instead of
staying at his home in Mexico City, Borlaug insisted on going to a nearby
experiment station in Mexico's central highlands. Dressed in his usual
khakis, work boots, and baseball cap, he taught an international group
of young agronomists amid the wheat plots. When the media arrived, Borlaug
nearly got into a physical confrontation with photographers who were trampling
his precious wheat hybrids.
He adapted quickly. When needed, he would wear a suit and a flower in
his lapel. An innately private man, he felt his new public prominence
required him to speak out. Less than a year after receiving the prize
he took on the environmentalist movement, warning that a ban on the pesticide
DDT would cause widespread "disease and disaster" in developing
countries. He was vilified, as he knew he would be, but events have weakened
his critics' arguments.
"It would be helpful when you're working on these problems to develop
a skin as thick as a rhino's hide, so you don't feel all the darts,"
Borlaug says. "Oh, there are lots of critics. If you don't do anything
you'll never have critics."
If there's one thread running through Borlaug's life it's doing - acting
with fierce determination. Working on a problem as fundamental as world
hunger is a complicated business, and Borlaug is a complicated man, somehow
balancing contradictions. He is the scientist and the dirt farmer; the
advocate of common sense and the master of political subtleties; the humanitarian
and the pugnacious fighter; the idealist and the consultant to governments
of every political ideology. He has been called a peaceful revolutionary,
and the tension in that term - between benevolence and aggressiveness
- seems particularly apt.
|
