Yuan Longping has died | Hacker News Reader

Yuan Longping has died

en.wikipedia.org

164 pointszhte41560 comments

Many people are grateful to him for his contributions in fighting famine. When his body was transported, many people ran on the streets, shouting to the cars. Here's a video: https://twitter.com/Jingjing_Li/status/1396454905200533509

For context, in an event like this honking car horns is a sign of respect. Same as the remembrance of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake when all traffic stopped and blew their horns.

Father of hybrid rice. Saved millions of people from chronic hunger and famine.

I was just talking about him yesterday.

I wish there was a reference for this statement in wikipedia:

>>> In 1979, his technique for hybrid rice was introduced into the United States, making it the first case of intellectual property rights transfer in the history of the People's Republic of China.

It seems like a company called IRRI bought his technique in 1979, but I can’t find accurate source：

> IRRI became involved in hybrid rice research in 1979

https://www.irri.org/hybrid-rice

> in 1979 ... my aid Li Yuanqing and I are working in a IRRI experimental plot...

from Yuan’s oral autobiography https://books.google.com/books?id=AVp_DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT283&lpg=...

> IRRI ... halted its research the following year, only restarting it in 1979 after China had fired up international interest by commercializing the technology.

from a journal called Rice Today(the first footnote of https://www.irri.org/hybrid-rice)

EDIT: no, IRRI is a Philippine company.

The International Rice Research Institute is an international nonprofit research and educational institute headquartered in Philippines, not “a Philippine company”.

Wow - Dr. Longping sounds like incredible individual. Does anyone have any recomendations for good articles/books about him?

New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/23/world/asia/yuan-longping-...

Here's a speech he gave a few years ago: https://youtu.be/0ts9RqOKaBM

Thanks! the speech was interesting

This guy is cool: being raised by teachers, spending time in nature and avoiding politics is pretty astute. What a shame he didn't live to see the era where open source observations on iNaturalist et al could allow him to do international field work by proxy in his old age. I think we will hang a picture of him in our company office (foodtech robotics in China).

He really picked an interesting retirement spot: Hainan is a tropical island known for surfing, sailing, obtaining US spy planes, former cultural and ethnographic diversity including Austronesian and Tai, an influx of Russians to the point where the street signs are in bizzarro alt-Blacksea cyrillic, and alleged tests of GFW-free internet in China. The powers that be are giving lip service to setting it up as an HK-alternative investment gateway to China with proximity to SEA, perhaps largely just to spite HK.

I had not heard about hybrid rice until now. It is cool that it has a 20% to 30% higher yield than common rice.

I had heard about "golden rice", which is a genetically modified rice that produces beta carotene. I don't know what happened to it, though.

"Uncle Ben's" should have been "Dr. Longping's"

Minor correction, his family name is Yuan. Longping is his given name.

I presume Ben is not his family name. Some doctors like to be called by their first name, e.g. Dr Drew

The Uncle Ben brand is intended for the US market and as such is treated so that the grains are less likely to stick together. This isn't the kind of thing that Dr. Longping was interested in.

forgive my ignorance...but I thought a guy at the USDA developed the hybrid rice used in a lot of asia?

Ahh - Dr. Borlaug did wheat it appears:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

Yes the First generation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_rice#History

Quoting the NYT obituary:

Mr. Yuan’s research arguably had effects at least as broad, since rice is the main grain for half the world’s population and wheat for a third.

Also Borlaug did it mostly in Mexico.

He (or his work) was adapted for India spurring the “Green Revolution” which was responsible for ending chronic food shortages in India. Absolutely massive impact made by one man.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/green-r...

Yeah - I think I was confusing India and China...And wheat and rice.

Sad that people that have had such a profound impact on the world, in such good ways, are relatively unknown.

You may be interested in https://gitlab.com/kragen/derctuo/blob/master/markdown/hacke..., although it's pretty incomplete. Yuan isn't on there, for example.

Gahh....Noo...I'll never finish looking all that up :-P Thanks - there's some interesting stuff there

/me runs off to google "House of Wisdom"

I do wonder, it seems like a lot of his most important experiments and hybridization attempts were quite low tech compared to what I would have expected.

I wonder if it would be fairly accessible to making ones own hybrids in a backyard garden type scenario?

Does anyone have any experience knowledge on that sort of thing?

Very interesting.

However, the fact that you can't replant hybrid rice, and are dependent on contiuous breeding of first-generation hybrids, makes it potentially problematic politically. A state or privately-owned source of hybrids can have rice cultivating farmers "by the balls" so to speak.

You know the ideological crusaders has gone overboard when there are this amount of controversy when a scientist that works on rice has died.

It's ridiculous, he isn't even a CCP member. Y'all should be ashamed of yourself to put any amount of ideology to someone whose whole work in life is to produce more food, so people don't starve.

This is a case of the contrarian dynamic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I agree with you that the commenters who took the thread into nationalistic and ideological flamewar have broken the site guidelines shamefully, but this does not characterize the thread, and certainly not the community. The opposite is the case, which is how a comment like yours, castigating the comments, ends up in an ironic position at the top of the thread. There are many explanations at the above link. I'm going to mark this subthread off topic now.

But this is China, the CCP has full control of the media.

Quote the Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

> The Great Chinese Famine (Chinese: 三年大饥荒, "three years of great famine") was a period between 1959 and 1961 in the history of the People's Republic of China (PRC) characterized by widespread famine.[1][2][3][4][5] Some scholars have also included the years 1958 or 1962.[6][7][8][9] The Great Chinese Famine is widely regarded as the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million).[3][4][5][10][11][12][13][14][15]

> The major contributing factors in the famine were the policies of the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962) and people's communes, such as inefficient distribution of food due to the planned economy, requiring the use of poor agricultural techniques, the Four Pests Campaign that reduced bird populations (which disrupted the ecosystem), over-reporting of grain production (which was actually decreasing), and ordering millions of farmers to switch to iron and steel production.[3][5][7][12][14][16] During the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in early 1962, Liu Shaoqi, the second Chairman of the PRC, formally attributed 30% of the famine to natural disasters and 70% to man-made errors ("三分天灾, 七分人祸").[7][17][18] After the launch of Reforms and Opening Up, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officially stated in June 1981 that the famine was mainly due to the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward as well as the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in addition to some natural disasters and the Sino-Soviet split.[1][2]

BTW: Wikipedia is banned in China.

Not sure what you are trying to say here. As mentioned in the tweet, he is revered because his research truly did improve agriculture. As opposed to the previous generation of agriculture researchers that worked on the Great Leap Forward that caused the famine.

"the previous generation of agriculture researchers that worked on the Great Leap Forward that caused the famine"? What the hell are you talking about? What do you mean "agriculture researchers that worked on the Great Leap Forward"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko

> What the hell are you talking about?

Don't talk to people like this on HN. Thanks.

Yuan Longping's breakthrough happened in the 70s. The great famine happened in early 60s.

I'm not sure what your post is about.

I was responding to this: "Many people are grateful to him for his contributions in fighting famine. "

And? Should people hate him for what he did? What is the dispute here? Would you not feel grateful for his contributions, regardless of what end of the political spectrum you're on?

Take your ideology crusade elsewhere.

What? "Yuan Longping's breakthrough happened in the 70s. The great famine happened in early 60s." This is your own words!

I'm totally lost. Are you implying he's responsible for the great famine somehow?

"Fighting famine" is a generic term. His contributions prevented future famine. That does count as "fighting famine", doesn't it?

Are you aware that there has been more than one famine in history?

The OP said "fighting famine", not "fighting the famine". Without the definite article "the", their sentence can (and arguably should) be read as referring to famine as a class of calamities, not to a particular one.

As a further example, the job of a firefighter is to fight fires as they happen, not to help the UK forever recover from The Great Fire of London.

So what? Famine has been a thing long before and long after the birth of any modern day ideology. (I say “modern day” because I’m not sure if the very first hunter-gatherers had ideologies.) Even if famine was never a thing, increasing crop yields is still worthwhile research that directly benefits mankind, and it goes beyond boundaries.

A scientist who devoted their entire life to ending hunger just passed away and all you can do is post some generic ideological bait. Somewhere along your ideological quest a line of basic human decency is crossed.

I was responding to this: "Many people are grateful to him for his contributions in fighting famine. "

And is that not true? Are those people not grateful? What is your point?

Ever since introduction of potato to China large scale famines disappeared in China except for those caused by war, and by army and government seizing foods. Those modern famines are notable for their scale, duration, and entirely man-made political causes. CCP absolutely insists on calling them "natural disasters," precisely because they are unnatural. That is what!

Taking HN threads into nationalistic flamewar or ideological flamewar will get you banned on HN. No more of this, please. What you posted here was particularly lame and shallow.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27262618.

I didn't want to make any flamewar, nationalistic or ideological. I was simply pointing out the fact that he had nothing to do with the great famine. The back and forth from others was not my intention. Anyway.

If you really just meant to point out that he had nothing to do with the great famine, then I definitely did not understand your intention, and I dare say almost no other readers did either. That was super unclear!

This comes up a lot actually. Intent does not communicate itself on the internet—especially not on divisive/flamewar topics. Therefore the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

As for the back and forth, I understand completely how when people start feeling mutually provoked, the discussion tends to spiral downward in a tit-for-tat way that is incredibly hard to resist. We all need to work on that (me included).

Thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com