By Li Hongmei
A team led by Yuan Longping, China's "father of hybrid rice," has won a national award for progress in science and technology for his work on two-line hybrid rice technology.
The special prize was handed out in Beijing by the National Office for Science and Technology Awards on Jan. 10.
The 83-year-old scientist, whose "brand" has been estimated by industry analysts to be worth more than 100 billion yuan (US$16.5 billion), says his wish is to be able to generate 1,000 kilograms of hybrid rice per mu - a Chinese unit of measurement equal to about 666 square meters - by 2015.
Yuan has already decided to share his 1 million yuan (US$165,000) prize equally among his 50 research team members.
According to the Xinhua news agency, the two-line hybrid rice breeding system driven by Yuan is a technology pioneered by China and can develop high quality rice at 20 times the probability of three-line hybrids, and with better overall quality and volume.
Using the two-line hybrid system, China successfully achieved targets of 700kg, 800kg and 900kg of rice per mu in 2000, 2004 and 2012, respectively, with the fourth test in Sept. 2012 yielding 988kg per mu.
As at the end of 2012, the technology has been utilized in 499 million mu across 16 provinces, cities and autonomous regions in the country, producing 11.1 billion kilograms of grains valued at 27.2 billion yuan (US$4.5 billion).
Born in 1930, Yuan moved around with his family throughout his youth before eventually graduating from Chongqing's Southwest Agriculture Institute in 1953 and commencing his career as an academic at an agricultural school in south-central China's Hunan province.
Following a series of natural disasters in the 1960s, Yuan decided to conduct research into the field of hybrid rice, leading to the discovery of a natural hybrid rice plant in 1964. To solve the problem of reproducing hybrid rice in mass quantities, Yuan theorized using naturally-mutated male-sterile rice to create reproductive hybrid rice species, which became his most important contribution to the technology.
Yuan would go on to achieve more breakthroughs in the field, such as crossbreeding rice with wild rice in the 1970s, eventually developing a type of hybrid that yielded 20% more per unit than that of common ones. More than 40 years later, as much as 50% of China's total rice fields grow Yuan's hybrid rice species and yield 60% of the rice production in the country.
To those who know him, Yuan is happiest when he is in the rice paddies with a cigarette in hand, observing his students - most of whom are national-level researchers - analyze rice breeds. Observers say he looks just like an ordinary old farmer and nothing like the noted scientist that he is.
Yuan has continued to defend genetically modified food, revealing that he is currently researching how to transform a certain gene of corn into rice, which would improve photosynthetic efficiency by 30% to 50% and increase output. He said he believes rice developed from this type of gene would safe for consumption as it is transformed from corn, though the procedure has not yet been successful.
