個人資料
正文

紐約時報 雜交水稻之父袁隆平去世 幫助世界解決饑荒和貧困

(2023-07-25 13:20:49) 下一個

"雜交水稻之父”袁隆平去世:幫助世界解決饑荒和貧困

KEITH BRADSHER, 儲百亮  2021年5月24日
 
袁隆平的發現對結束大多數水稻種植國家的饑荒有很大貢獻。
袁隆平的發現對結束大多數水稻種植國家的饑荒有很大貢獻。 
 
上海——中國植物科學家袁隆平周六在湖南長沙逝世,享年90歲。他在高產雜交水稻方麵的突破性工作,幫助從亞洲到非洲的大片地區解決了饑餓和貧困問題。
 
據中國主要官方報紙《人民日報》報道,袁隆平的死因是多器官功能衰竭。湖南一家官方媒體曾在早些時候的一篇報道中說,自從今年3月參觀一個水稻育種研究基地時摔了一跤後,袁隆平的健康狀況越來越不好。
 
袁隆平的研究讓他成了一名民族英雄和中國堅持科學追求的象征。他的去世引發了全國各地的哀悼。袁隆平身材瘦小,曾經清秀的麵容由於年老略顯幹癟,他在中國是名人,有數百人在停放他遺體的殯儀館前獻了鮮花
 
位於菲律賓洛斯巴諾斯的國際水稻研究所(International Rice Research Institute)的雜交水稻育種資深科學家焦哈爾·阿裏(Jahar Ali)說,袁隆平在雜交水稻種植方麵有兩項重大發現。這些20世紀70年代初的發現,加上美國植物科學家諾曼·布勞格(Norman Borlaug) 20世紀50年代和60年代在小麥育種上取得的突破性進展,帶來了一場使糧食產量大幅增長、結束了世界大部分地區饑荒的綠色革命。
 
布勞格已於2009年去世,他在1970年獲得了諾貝爾和平獎。袁隆平的研究按理說至少有同樣廣泛的影響,因為水稻是世界上一半人口的主要糧食,而小麥是世界上三分之一的人口的主要糧食。
2004年,袁隆平與諾貝爾和平獎獲得者諾曼·布勞格在一起,布勞格在小麥種植方麵做了突破性工作。
2004年,袁隆平與諾貝爾和平獎獲得者諾曼·布勞格在一起,布勞格在小麥種植方麵做了突破性工作。 
 
1970年時,袁隆平對自己在提高水稻產量方麵進展緩慢越來越感到懊惱。他突然有了一個改變策略的想法:去中國偏遠地區尋找野生品種,以獲得更有希望的遺傳物質。
在中國最南端的海南島,袁隆平的團隊在一條鐵路附近找到一片野生水稻,這是第一個突破。第二年,袁隆平在中國發表了一篇研究論文,描述了如何將野生水稻的遺傳物質轉移到商業品種中去的技術。
 
加入了野生稻遺傳物質後,世界上高度自交的商業水稻品種就可以容易地進行雜交,從而大幅提高作物產量。
 
當時,世界水稻科學家都在討論培育雜交品種的問題。1971年,國際水稻研究所、位於德裏的印度農業研究所(Indian Agricultural Research Institute),以及加州的一個研究小組分別發表了三篇有關雜交水稻的類似論文。
 
但袁隆平的論文是這四篇論文中最實際、最詳細的。“袁隆平的論文在技術方麵好很多,”阿裏說。“在雜交水稻是是中國在領跑。”
 
印度、菲律賓和美國的研究小組在發表了論文後繼續做研究,而袁隆平第二年就馬上培育出了雜交水稻品種,並在雜交水稻育種中使用了來自海南的野生稻。
 
到了1978年,袁隆平已在湖南負責雜交水稻的大規模種植工作。他有生之年的大部研究工作都是在那裏進行的。他還負責了海南的研究工作,今年3月他也是在那裏摔倒的。
 
在使用同樣的插秧、施肥和灌溉技術下,雜交水稻品種的畝產量通常比非雜交品種的高出20%到30%。隨著袁隆平及其不斷壯大的水稻專家團隊將雜交品種引進到亞洲和非洲各地,他們也向農民傳授了一係列先進的水稻種植技術,讓產量進一步提高。
 
在大多數種植水稻對國家,產量的大幅上升讓饑荒成了一個遙遠的記憶。“他挽救了很多很多生命,”占地207萬平方米的上海辰山植物園園長胡永紅說。
 
巧合的是,周六晚上,十幾名中國頂尖植物育種專家正在陰沉的天空下聚集在植物園,坐在一場室外交響音樂會的中排。在音樂家們調試樂器時,科學家們輪番談起了袁隆平。 
曾任北京大學校長、並一直在北大從事生命科學研究的許智宏說,袁隆平根本的才能一直都很明顯:他對水稻及其生長方式有細致入微的觀察。
 
“他本人的興趣真的高度集中在水稻上,所以他把每年的很多時間花在田裏,”許智宏說。自1980年以來,許智宏和袁隆平曾一起為好幾個全國性的農業委員會工作。
 
這些植物學家一致認為,袁隆平對中國農業也有巨大影響,因為他既是一名好導師,也是團隊的有力領導者。這讓袁隆平最終起了更重要的作用,而不是隻將工作局限於實驗室和寫論文上。
袁隆平在中國是一位名人,是堅持科學追求的象征。
袁隆平在中國是一位名人,是堅持科學追求的象征。 
 
“我認識他在湖南的一些同事,他們在他的指導下都取得了很好的成就,”從中國科學院上海生命科學研究院院長職位上退下來的中科院教授陳曉亞說。
 
在默默無聞地工作了幾十年後,作為一名做出了世界級貢獻的中國科學家,袁隆平從20世紀80年代起聞名全國。他的發現成了值得中國驕傲的東西,中國領導人難堪地意識到其他國家已在科學上領先。
 
“那些東西成了科學創新的象征,不隻是農業,也對所有學科而言,”陳曉亞說。
 
袁隆平在20世紀70年的發現之後,一直強烈主張與世界共享他的突破性工作,而不是用這些突破來實現中國主導全球的水稻生產。
 
1980年,他主動向國際水稻研究所捐贈了關鍵的水稻品種,該研究所後來用這些品種開發出也可在熱帶國家生長的雜交品種。袁隆平及其團隊向印度、馬達加斯加、利比裏亞和其他地方的農民教授了雜交水稻種植技術。
 
袁隆平1930年9月7日出生在北京(當時稱北平)一個對當時來說是受過異常良好教育的家庭。他的母親華靜是英文教師,父親袁興烈也是一名教師,後來當了鐵路官員。袁隆平經常提到母親為他樹立的榜樣。
 
“她是當時少有的知識女性,”袁隆平在2010年出版的回憶錄中寫道。“我從小就受到她良好的熏陶。”
 
袁隆平在六個兄弟姐妹中排行老二。戰爭、日本侵略和經濟動蕩迫使他的家庭輾轉於中國南方。但他說,他的父母堅持讓孩子接受良好的教育。
 
1949年,他上了大學。在中共鞏固對國家控製的時候,他選擇了在西南的一所學校讀農業科學,盡管他沒有農村背景,父母對他學農也有所擔憂。他選擇農業科學的最初靈感部分來自一次學校組織的農場參觀,還有部分來自查理·卓別林(Charlie Chaplin)的電影《摩登時代》(Modern Times)中小流浪漢在自家門前吃葡萄、喝鮮牛奶的田園詩般的情景。
“隨著年齡的增長,這種渴望變得更加強烈,農業科學成了我一生的職業,”他在回憶錄中寫道。
 
袁隆平選擇專攻作物遺傳學時,該學科在中國是一個意識形態雷區。毛澤東拒絕了現代遺傳學,接受了蘇聯科學家的學說,後者堅持認為基因可以通過改變環境條件(比如溫度)直接得到改造。蘇聯科學家聲稱,這將為大幅提高作物產量開辟道路。
 
但在課外,袁隆平在管相桓教授的鼓舞下學習了格裏格·孟德爾(Gregor Mendel)和其他遺傳學先驅的論著。管相桓因拒絕接受蘇聯的教條在1950年代被中共打成“右派”,於1966年自殺,那年毛澤東發動的文化大革命讓他再次成為受迫害的對象。
 
袁隆平1953年大學畢業後在湖南省一所農學院當了教師,繼續對作物遺傳學保持著興趣。20世紀50年代末,他獻身農業的決心有了更大的緊迫感,毛澤東搞的“大躍進”——迫不及待的農業集體化和大煉鋼鐵的努力——讓中國陷入了一場現代史上最嚴重的饑荒,導致幾千萬人死亡。袁隆平說,他曾在路邊或田裏看到過至少五具死於饑餓者的屍體。
 
“餓急了,有什麽東西就吃什麽東西,草根、樹皮都吃,”袁隆平在回憶錄中回憶道。“這時我更下了決心,一定要解決糧食增產問題,不讓老百姓挨餓!”
他在回憶錄中寫道,目睹了毛時代的饑荒後,“這時我更下了決心,一定要解決糧食增產問題”。
他在回憶錄中寫道,目睹了毛時代的饑荒後,“這時我更下了決心,一定要解決糧食增產問題”。 
 
袁隆平很快決定研究水稻,這是許多中國人的主食。他尋找可以提高產量的雜交品種,去北京鑽研他所在的小院校無法獲得的科學期刊。就連在讓中國陷入政治內訌的文化大革命期間,他仍堅持自己的研究。
 
近幾十年來,中共把袁隆平頌揚為科學家的榜樣:他愛國、致力於解決實際問題,即使到了老年也堅持不懈地努力工作。他曾在77歲那年,為2008年北京奧運會在長沙附近傳遞過火炬
 
然而,對一位如此傑出的人來說不同尋常的是,袁隆平從未加入中國共產黨。“我不懂政治,”他2013年對一家中國雜誌說。
 
盡管如此,國家通訊社新華社仍在周末的報道中將他稱為“同誌”,他的逝世在中國引起了公眾的哀悼。他曾在2019年被國家領導人習近平授予共和國勳章,這是中國最高的官方榮譽。據《湖南日報》報道,習近平在周日對袁隆平的家屬致以哀悼,肯定袁隆平“對我國糧食安全、農業科技創新、世界糧食發展作出的重大貢獻”。
 
袁隆平的遺屬包括結婚57年的妻子鄧哲和三個兒子。他的遺體送別儀式定於周一上午在長沙舉行,屆時可能會引發新一輪的官方吊唁。
 
新華社報道,袁隆平直到今年年初仍在研究水稻新品種。
 
“這不是什麽秘密,我的經曆可以用四個詞來概括:知識、汗水、靈感和機會,”袁隆平去年在一段鼓勵中國年輕人投身科學的視頻中說。他還在英語引用了科學家路易斯·巴斯德(Louis Pasteur)的話:“機會青睞有準備的頭腦。”

Keith Bradsher自上海、儲百亮(Chris Buckley)自澳大利亞悉尼報道。

Keith Bradsher是《紐約時報》上海分社社長,曾任香港分社社長、底特律分社社長。他之前曾駐華盛頓報道國際貿易新聞,後駐紐約報道美國經濟和通信行業,還曾擔任航空業記者。歡迎在Twitter上關注他 @KeithBradsher

儲百亮(Chris Buckley)是《紐約時報》首席中國記者。他成長於澳大利亞悉尼,在過去30年中的大部分時間內居住在中國。在2012年加入《紐約時報》之前,他是路透社的一名記者。歡迎在Twitter上關注他 @ChuBailiang

Yuan Longping, Plant Scientist Who Helped Curb Famine, Dies at 90

His development of high-yield rice hybrids in the 1970s led to steeply rising harvests in Asia and Africa and made him a national hero in China, credited with saving countless lives.

 

The scientist Yuan Longping in 2006. His discoveries did much to end famine in most rice-growing countries.

The scientist Yuan Longping in 2006. His discoveries did much to end famine in most rice-growing countries.Credit...Adrian Bradshaw/European Pressphoto Agency

SHANGHAI — Yuan Longping, a Chinese plant scientist whose breakthroughs in developing high-yield hybrid strains of rice helped to alleviate famine and poverty across much of Asia and Africa, died on Saturday in Changsha, China. He was 90.

The cause was multiple organ failure, China’s main state-run newspaper, People’s Daily, reported. An earlier report from an official news service in Hunan Province, of which Changsha is the capital, said Mr. Yuan had been increasingly unwell since a fall in March during a visit to a rice-breeding research site.

Mr. Yuan’s research made him a national hero and a symbol of dogged scientific pursuit in China. His death triggered messages of grief across the country, where Mr. Yuan — slight and wizened in old age — was a celebrity. Hundreds left flowers at the funeral home where his body was being kept.

Mr. Yuan made two major discoveries in hybrid rice cultivation, said Jauhar Ali, the senior scientist for hybrid rice breeding at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, the Philippines. Those discoveries, in the early 1970s — together with breakthroughs in wheat cultivation in the ’50s and ’60s by Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist — helped create the Green Revolution of steeply rising harvests and an end to famine in most of the world.

 

Mr. Borlaug, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, died in 2009. 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.

 
Image
 
Mr. Yuan in 2004 with Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Peace laureate who made breakthroughs in wheat cultivation.Credit...Bill Neibergall/Des Moines Register, via Associated Press

By 1970, Mr. Yuan was growing frustrated with his halting progress in creating more productive rice crops. He hit upon a shift in strategy: Search for wild varieties across remote areas of China for more promising genetic material.

A breakthrough came when Mr. Yuan’s team found a stretch of wild rice near a rail line on Hainan Island, in southernmost China. The following year, Mr. Yuan separately published a research paper in China that explained how genetic material from wild rice could be transferred into commercial strains.

Once the wild rice’s genetic material was added, the world’s heavily inbred commercial rice strains could be hybridized with ease to produce big gains in crop output.

 

At that time, the world of rice scientists was full of talk of developing hybrid strains. Three similar papers on rice hybridization were published in 1971: by the International Rice Research Institute, the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi and a team of California researchers.

But Mr. Yuan’s paper was the most practical and detailed of the four. “His paper was much better in terms of the technology,” Mr. Ali said. “It was China who led the game afterward.”

While the teams in India, the Philippines and the United States kept doing research after publishing their papers, Mr. Yuan immediately developed hybrid strains of rice the next year. To create the hybrids, he used the wild rice from Hainan.

By 1978, Mr. Yuan had already overseen the start of large-scale production of hybrid rice in Hunan Province, in China’s southwest. He ended up doing most of his research there for the rest of his life. He also oversaw research in Hainan, where he suffered his fall in March.

Hybrid rice varieties typically produce 20 to 30 percent more rice per acre than nonhybrid strains when cultivated with the same transplant techniques, fertilizer and water. But as Mr. Yuan and his ever-growing teams of rice experts introduced hybrid strains across Asia and Africa, they also taught farmers a wide range of advanced rice-growing techniques that produced further gains.

 

Steeply rising yields helped to make famines a distant memory in most rice-growing countries. “He saved a lot — a lot — of lives,” said Hu Yonghong, the director of the 500-acre Shanghai Chenshan Botanical Garden.

By coincidence, a dozen of China’s top plant-breeding experts gathered under overcast skies on Saturday evening in the middle row of an outdoor symphony concert at the botanical garden. As the musicians tuned their instruments, the scientists took turns talking about Mr. Yuan.

Xu Zhihong, a former president of Peking University and a longtime professor of life sciences there, said that Mr. Yuan’s underlying talent was always clear: He paid minute attention to rice plants and how they grew.

“His personal interests were really very focused on rice, so every year he spent a lot of time in the field,” said Professor Xu, who had worked with Mr. Yuan on various national agriculture committees since 1980.

 

Mr. Yuan also had an enormous effect on Chinese agriculture, the botanists agreed, because he was a good mentor and a strong leader of teams, and so he ended up playing a far larger role than if he had confined himself to laboratory work and writing papers.

 
Image
 
Mr. Yuan in 2014. He was a celebrity in China, a symbol of dogged scientific pursuit.Credit...Visual China Group, via Getty Images

“I know some of his colleagues in Hunan — they all had very good achievements under his supervision,” said Chen Xiaoya, a professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director emeritus of the academy’s Plant Physiology and Ecology Institute.

Starting in the 1980s, after decades of working in relative obscurity, Mr. Yuan became nationally celebrated as a Chinese scientist making world-class advances. His discoveries became a point of pride for China, whose leaders had become painfully aware that other countries had raced ahead in science.

“That became a symbol of scientific innovation, not only of agriculture but of all science,” Professor Chen said.

After his discoveries in the early 1970s, Mr. Yuan became a strong advocate for sharing his breakthroughs internationally, instead of using them to achieve Chinese dominance in rice production.

 

He took the initiative in donating crucial rice strains in 1980 to the International Rice Research Institute, which later used them to develop hybrid varieties that could also grow in tropical countries. Mr. Yuan and his team taught farmers in India, Madagascar, Liberia and elsewhere to grow hybrid rice.

Yuan Longping was born on Sept. 7, 1930, in Beijing, or Beiping, as it was then called. His mother, Hua Jing, taught English, and his father, Yuan Xinglie, was a schoolteacher who later became a railroad official. Mr. Yuan often cited the example set by his mother.

“She was an educated woman at a time when they were uncommon,” he said in a memoir published in 2010. “From early on I came under her uplifting influence.”

Mr. Yuan was the second of six siblings. His life and schooling were unsettled as war, the Japanese invasion and economic upheaval forced the family to move around southern China. But he said his parents insisted that their children receive a solid education.

He entered college in 1949, just as the Chinese Communist Party was consolidating its control of the country, and chose to specialize in agronomy at a school in the southwest. His initial inspiration for choosing agricultural science — despite not having a rural background, and despite the misgivings of his parents — came partly from visiting a farm for a school excursion, and partly from an idyllic scene in Charlie Chaplin’s film “Modern Times,” in which the Little Tramp savors grapes and fresh milk at the doorstep of his home.

 
 
Image
 
Witnessing famine in China during the Mao era made Mr. Yuan “even more determined to solve the problem of how to increase food production,” he wrote in a memoir.Credit...Imaginechina, via Associated Press

“As I grew older, the desire became stronger, and agronomy became my life’s vocation,” he wrote in his memoir.

Mr. Yuan chose to specialize in crop genetics at a time when the subject was an ideological minefield in China. Mao Zedong had embraced the doctrines of Soviet scientists who rejected modern genetics and maintained that genes could be directly rewired by altering environmental conditions, such as the temperature. They claimed this would open the way to dramatic rises in crop yields.

But outside class, Yuan studied the findings of Gregor Mendel and other pioneers in genetics, encouraged by Guan Xianghuan, a professor who rejected Soviet dogma. Later, in the 1950s, Professor Guan was labeled a “rightist” enemy of the Communist Party for rejecting the Soviet ideas, and he took his own life in 1966 after facing renewed persecution during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

After graduating in 1953, Mr. Yuan took a job as a teacher at an agricultural college in Hunan Province, keeping up his interest in crop genetics. His commitment to the field took on greater urgency from the late 1950s, when Mao’s so-called Great Leap Forward — his frenzied effort to collectivize agriculture and jump-start steel production — plunged China into the worst famine of modern times, killing tens of millions. Mr. Yuan said he saw the bodies of at least five people who had died of starvation by the roadside or in fields.

 

“Famished, you would eat whatever there was to eat, even grass roots and tree bark,” Mr. Yuan recalled in his memoir. “At that time I became even more determined to solve the problem of how to increase food production so that ordinary people would not starve.”

Mr. Yuan soon settled on researching rice, the staple food for many Chinese people, searching for hybrid varieties that could boost yields and traveling to Beijing to immerse himself in scientific journals that were unavailable at his small college. He plowed on with his research even as the Cultural Revolution threw China into deadly political infighting.

In recent decades, the Communist Party came to celebrate Mr. Yuan as a model scientist: patriotic, dedicated to solving practical problems, relentlessly hard-working even in old age. At 77, in 2008, he even carried the Olympic torch near Changsha for a segment of its route to the Beijing Olympics.

Unusually for such a prominent figure, though, Mr. Yuan never joined the Chinese Communist Party. “I don’t understand politics,” he told a Chinese magazine in 2013.

Even so, the state news agency, Xinhua, honored him this weekend as a “comrade,” and his death brought an outpouring of public mourning in China. In 2019, he was one of eight Chinese individuals awarded the Medal of the Republic, China’s highest official honor, by Xi Jinping, the national leader. On Sunday, Mr. Xi sent condolences to Mr. Yuan’s family, declaring that Mr. Yuan had “made major contributions to our national food security, agricultural scientific innovation and global food development,” The Hunan Daily reported.

 

Mr. Yuan is survived by his wife of 57 years, Deng Zhe, as well as three sons. His funeral, scheduled for Monday morning in Changsha, is likely to bring a new burst of official condolences.

As recently as this year, Mr. Yuan was still working on developing new varieties of rice, according to Xinhua.

“There’s no secret to it; my experience can be summed in four words: knowledge, sweat, inspiration and opportunity,” Mr. Yuan said in a video message last year encouraging young Chinese to go into science. In English, he quoted the scientist Louis Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

Keith Bradsher reported from Shanghai and Chris Buckley from Sydney, Australia.

Chris Buckley is chief China correspondent and has lived in China for most of the past 30 years after growing up in Sydney, Australia. Before joining The Times in 2012, he was a correspondent in Beijing for Reuters. More about Chris Buckley

[ 打印 ]
閱讀 ()評論 (0)
評論
目前還沒有任何評論
登錄後才可評論.