The plant that fed 70 million extra people grew beside a railway
Yuan Longping spent a decade chasing a theory nobody believed, then found the missing piece growing wild next to train tracks in Hainan.
Rice pollinates itself. Every grain fertilizes its own flower, which is efficient for the plant and a dead end for anyone trying to breed a stronger hybrid, since hybridization needs separate male and female parents to cross. By the early 1960s, most agricultural scientists treated large-scale hybrid rice as a non-starter for exactly this reason.
Yuan Longping, a teacher at an agricultural school in Hunan, disagreed with the consensus rather than the plant. In 1961 he spotted a single unusual seed-head of wild rice and started to suspect that naturally sterile male rice plants might exist somewhere, rice that couldn't pollinate itself and would therefore have to be crossed. He and a student spent an entire summer searching fields for more. It took years to confirm the hypothesis, and years more after that before an early hybrid actually outperformed ordinary rice, which at first it didn't.
The breakthrough came in 1970, when Yuan's team found a particular wild rice variety growing beside a railway line on Hainan island. Bred into his program, it pushed yields up 20 to 30 percent within a decade.
China's rice output more than tripled between 1950 and 2017. Researchers estimate the resulting annual yield gains are enough to feed roughly 70 million additional people, a number that started with one scientist refusing to accept that a self-pollinating plant had nothing left to give.