Norman Borlaug, the plant breeder known as the Father of the Green Revolution, would have been 100 on March 25.
Norman’s life was one of extraordinary paradoxes. He was a child of the Iowa prairie during the Great Depression who attended a one-room school, aspired to become a high school science teacher but flunked the university entrance exam. Yet he ultimately went on to become one of only six people in history to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and the Nobel Peace Prize, for a series of agricultural innovations that averted malnutrition, famine and the death of millions.
Perhaps as a result of Norman himself often going hungry during his childhood and college years, his modus vivendi might be summed up in several observations that he made about the importance of food and the application of science to feeding the hungry:
“There is no more essential commodity than food.”
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“You can’t eat potential.” In other words, you haven’t succeeded until you get new developments into the field and actually into people’s bellies.
“It is easy to forget that science offers more than a body of knowledge and a process for adding new knowledge. It tells us not only what we know but what we don’t know.”
Read the full, original article: Norman Borlaug: A Man For All Seasons
