Yuan Longping Develops Indica Hybrid Rice

Yuan Longping (1930–2021), a native of De’an, Jiangxi, was born in Beijing and spent many years teaching at Anjiang Agricultural School in Hunan. In the early 1960s China suffered severe food shortages, and Yuan resolved to defeat hunger with agricultural science. At the time it was held internationally that rice is a self-pollinating crop with no hybrid vigor. In 1964 Yuan found naturally male-sterile rice plants in the experimental field at Anjiang and began researching hybrid rice. In 1966 he published the paper “Male Sterility in Rice,” proposing breeding hybrid rice with a matched “three-line” system. In 1970 his assistant Li Bihu and others found a wild rice plant with aborted pollen in Sanya, Hainan, which Yuan named “Wild Abortive” (yeba) and which opened the breakthrough. With the cooperation of many research institutions, in 1973 Yuan’s team completed the matched “three lines” of male-sterile, maintainer and restorer lines and successfully bred indica hybrid rice. It yields about 20 percent more than conventional rice; planting began to spread nationwide in 1976, and by the end of the 20th century hybrid rice had added several hundred billion kilograms of grain in total. Yuan later proposed the “two-line method” and researched super hybrid rice. Hybrid rice also spread to many countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas, contributing enormously to solving the world’s food problems. Yuan is hailed as the “Father of Hybrid Rice”; in 2000 he won the first State Preeminent Science and Technology Award, and in 2019 the Medal of the Republic. He died in Changsha in May 2021.