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[[History of science and technology in China]]

“I saw five hungry people on the road. They fell beside the ridge, under the bridge and on the side of the road. I saw it with my own eyes. It was very miserable.” --(Quote by him from an interview). Longping Yuan came up with an idea for hybridizing rice in the 1960s when a series of natural disasters and inappropriate policies (the Great Leap Forward) had plunged China into an unprecedented famine that caused millions of Chinese deaths. Back into the 1950s, two theories of heredity were taught in China. One theory was from Gregor Mendel and Thomas Hunt Morgan which was based on genes. The other one was from Soviet Union scientists Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin and Trofim Lysenko which stated organisms would change to adapt environmental changes and their offspring would inherit the changes. Later, in the era of "Leaning to the Soviet Union side", any ideology from the Soviet Union was deemed to be the only truth while everything else would be heretical. Yuan, as an agricultural student at Southwest University, remained skeptical on both theories and started his own experiments to find out the answer.

His first experiment was on sweet potato. Following Michurin's theory, he grafted Ipomoea alba, a kind of flower with high Photosynthesis rate and high starch production, on to sweet potatoes. Those sweet potatoes grew a lot bigger than the normal ones, with the biggest one reaching 8kg. However, when he got the seed and plant the second generation, sweet potatoes were still normal sweet potatoes with their original leaves, and the flower did not grow a sweet potato beneath. He also tried graftage on a lot of other plants, but none of the beneficial traits were presented in the offsprings, which completely contradicts Michurin's theory.

"Since 1958, I feel like I should follow Medal and Morgan because that is the real science. In the agricultural area, the mainstream was still following Michurin and Lysenko and regarding Medal and Morgan as ‘Idealism’. I have learned some background of Medal and Morgan's theories, and I know from journal papers that there are already numerous experiments that have proven its validity, such as seedless watermelon. I desire to read more and learn more about them, but I can only do it secretly."

Famine

Starting from 1959, China experienced the Great Chinese Famine. Yuan, as an agricultural scientist, couldn't do anything to help people around him. "There was nothing in the field because hungry people took away all the edible things they can find. They eat grass, seeds, Fern roots, or even white clay. At the very extreme, people started to eat other people." Yuan considered applying the inheritance rules onto sweet potatoes and wheat since they were the practical solutions for the famine. However, he realized that in Southern China sweet potato was never a part of the daily diet and wheat didn't grow well in that area. Therefore, he turned his mind to rice.

Heterosis

Back in 1906, geneticist George Harrison Shull did experiments on the hybrid maize. He observed that inbreeding reduced vigor and production among offsprings but crossbreeding did the opposite. Those experiments proved the concept of Heterosis. In the 1950s, geneticist J. C. Stephens and few others utilized the hybrid of two breeds found in Africa and created the high production seeds for sorghum. Those results were inspiring for Yuan. However, maize and sorghum achieve pollination mainly through cross-pollination, while rice is a self-pollinating plant. In Edmund Ware Sinnott's book Principles of Genetics, it clearly stated that self-pollinating plants, like wheat and rice, experienced long-term selection both by nature and by human. Therefore, the traits that were inferior were all excluded, and the remaining traits are all superior. He speculated that there would be no advantage doing cross breeding for rice. And the nature of self-pollinating make it hard to do cross breed experiments on rice on a large scale.

Male Sterile Rice

Before Yuan, Japanese scientists had found male sterile rice but they didn't published it. In 1960s, ZhenSheng Li, another farmer from China, invented a method to get rid of the stamen. Since stamen could not endure high temperature as Gynoecium does, putting stamen into 45°C water can effectively make it sterile. This method made early experiments possible. However, since the flowering period of rice is extremely short, putting the rice panicle into the hot water one by one was very inefficient and unstable. In the next few years, Yuan dedicated to find the first male sterile rice plant in China.In 1964, he happened to find a natural hybrid rice plant that had obvious advantages over others. Greatly encouraged, he began to study the elements of this particular type.

The biggest problem by then, was having no known method to reproduce hybrid rice in mass quantities, and that was what Yuan set out to solve. In 1964, Yuan created his theory of using the probably-existing naturally-mutated male-sterile rice individuals for the creation of reproductive hybrid rice species, and in two years he managed to find a few individuals of such male-sterile rice that he predicted could be used for his research. Subsequent experiments proved his theory feasible, which was his most important contribution on hybrid rice.In 1966, Yuan published his discovery of mutant male-sterile rice plants onto April 1966 issue of Chinese Science Bulletin, and started a new page in developing new breeds of hybrid rice.

Yuan Longping in 1953 in Southwest University. Yuan in the back row, left three.

Yuan went on to solve more following problems. The first experimental hybrid rice species cultivated didn't show any significant advantage over common ones, so Yuan suggested crossbreeding rice with its further relative: the wild rice. In 1970, he found an important species of wild rice that he needed for the creation of high-yield hybrid rice species. In 1973, in cooperation with others, he was finally able to establish a complete process of creating and reproducing high-yield hybrid rice species.

The next year they successfully cultivated a type of hybrid rice species which had great advantages. It yielded 20 percent more per unit than that of common ones, putting China in the lead worldwide in rice production. For this achievement, he was dubbed the "Father of Hybrid Rice."

At present, as many as 50 percent of China's total rice fields grow Yuan Longping's hybrid rice species and yield 60 percent of the rice production in China. Due to Yuan's hard work, China's total rice output rose from 56,9 million tons in 1950 to 194,7 million tons last year; about 300 billion kilograms more have been produced over the last twenty years. The annual yield increase is enough to feed 60 million people.

The "Super Rice" Yuan is now working on has yields 30 percent higher than those of common rice. A record yield of 17,055 kilograms per hectare was registered in Yongsheng County in Yunnan Province in 1999.

In January 2014, Yuan said in an interview that genetically modified food is the future direction of food and that he had been working on genetic modification of rice. From Yuan Longping “Working on wheat does not seem viable in Hunan; Working on sweat potato is more like a meaningless Gimmick.”

There is a lack of arable land and water which means only new technology can increase the output of Chinese agriculture. Former President Jiang Zemin's has therefore called for a "new revolution in agricultural science and technology." Restrictions and regulations concerning genetically modified foods have been introduced or proposed after widespread public concern. China has been buying millions of foreign breeder animal as well as large amount of foreign semen and livestock embryos in order to rapidly improve the genetics of Chinese livestock. More advanced agricultural methods such as increasing use of pesticides has contributed to concerns regarding the Food safety in China. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_China

Our plan of improving this article

• This article about Longping Yuan was not cited correctly. The Biography part either has content that didn't cite or cited from an unknown source.
• It needs more content in the personal life and contribution part. I would say reorganized what it already has and add our addition resource would be a good idea.
• I will be focusing mostly on the history background of this hybrid rice discorvery and trying to provide an accurate context for readers. China was a country that suffered from food shortage in the 1960s and it is essential to make the reader understand information like this. (Not everyone has a deep understanding of famine nowadays).
• My partner Ryan will focus and technical part of his achievement.
• Some of the sources are tricky becasue they are written in Chinese. I need to be extra careful when citing those.

• bold

Potential Sources For Final Project

http://um9mh3ku7s.search.serialssolutions.com/?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info%3Aofi%2Fenc%3AUTF-8&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fsummon.serialssolutions.com&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Yuan+Longping%2C+Hybrid+Rice%2C+and+the+Meaning+of+Science+in+the+Cultural+Revolution+and+Beyond&rft.jtitle=Endeavour&rft.au=Schmalzer%2C+Sigrid&rft.date=2017-09-01&rft.pub=Elsevier+Science+Publishers&rft.issn=0160-9327&rft.eissn=1873-1929&rft.volume=41&rft.issue=3&rft.spage=94&rft_id=info:doi/10.1016%2Fj.endeavour.2017.06.006&rft.externalDBID=BKMMT&rft.externalDocID=512927730&paramdict=en-US https://www.citelighter.com/history/history/knowledgecards/history-of-agriculture-in-china

http://cdm15738.contentdm.oclc.org/utils/getfile/collection/p15738coll2/id/126179/filename/126350.pdf

Note: All of these sources that I have linked pertain to agriculture in China. We may want to expand our project to other technological developments in china as well. Rkosi (talk) 14:46, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

In 1974 the first Hybrid Rice varieties were used for agricultural purposes in China, 18 years after the first hybridization of rice by Henry Beachell. The reason for the delay is because of the self-fertilization nature of the rice crop, preventing the controlled breeding required for hybridization. It was not until 1974 that Chinese scientists were able to introduce a male-sterilizing chemical into their rice crop to prevent it from producing pollen, allowing them to control when and how fertilization takes place by manually applying the pollen to the crop. This discovery was made by Yuan Longping in 1960. The modifications to the rice crop have been slow and steady, gradual over the last half century. The first chain of hybrid rice yielded 13-20% more rice than natural rice, and according to China Daily, in 2011 hybrid rice could produce 13.9 tons of rice per hectare of land. More than 50% of the rice produced in China is now hybrid rice. Rkosi (talk) 16:47, 9 March 2018 (UTC)

Review of Draft by Thomas Ziervogel

From what is in your sandbox, you have a wide varied of sources and have understood them very well. You have correctly identified what needs to be done on the page of Yuan Longping and if you stick to that you will greatly improve it. The paragraph above is well written and will be a good addition the "Contributions" part of Yaun Longping's page. However, don't forget that you are editing page of Yaun Longping, so whatever you are adding needs to relate back to him and directly tie into him.

With this said, don't be afraid to really dig in and edit the personal life aspect of his page, as that is lacking as well.

The one thing that this page really can use is structure. Find natural points and breaks of topics to re-organize the page and make it friendly to follow.

Response from Kele Shi

Thank you for the advice. I think you are absolutely correct. Since this is a page about the person, some part of the personal life would be important. I need to find more material about that. Right now I have a lot of interview recordings that I can possible use and I will pick the ones that are most relative to the topic. Also I am reading his autobiography now. By the end of the editing, the structure of this essay will be changed completely.

Review of Draft by Savannah Swaringam

I think you are definitely moving in the right direction with your draft. You have a lot of sources to work with and have obviously done a lot of research on this topic. With that being said, I do think that you need to keep expanding. I think that the page could benefit from you taking a look at Yuan's life, as it is kind of vague. I also don't see the technical achievements that you said you would be working on in the above sections. Will you not be doing those? They would be a great contribution to the page if you did.

As for the paragraph you have finished, your sentence "This discovery was made by Yuan Longping in 1960, a man who is today referred to as the father of hybrid rice" might not need to be there. If this is farther down on the topic page, then we will already have information on Yuan and what he did, and it should have already mentioned his work on hybrid rice briefly in the introduction. It just seems a little out of place.

You are doing very well!

response from Kele Shi

Thank you for the advice. One of the problems for me is that the current version of his personal life, as you mentioned, is very vague. It has a little bit of everything but does not elaborate any of these personal events. A large portion of my sources are in Chinese so I had to add them in sentence by sentence. There is not a particular fix for this problem now. As the editing goes on, I will get those problems solving by having the whole essay restructured(follow my own time/logical structure and based on information I have). The rest of the part I will leave it to Ryan.

131.151.252.100 (talk) 16:35, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

response from Ryan Kosier

Thanks for the advice guys. I realize we have a ways to go. Expanding the section on his personal life is absolutely a priority, as that section is so light on information. The main issue is that a good portion of our resources are in Chinese, and I don't speak or read Chinese, and personal information, while of interest to scholars, typically is overlooked by the general public, so most people don't bother translating it to English. So I'm leaving that area to Kele, while I work on a editting the specifics of how he made these hybrid rice alterations and what discoveries and innovations he came up with. I don't know exactly how other groups are approaching their articles but I feel like ours, by necessity, is becoming more independent work, and that's posing a few challenges that we are working through. I'm confident we will get it all done though, as we have a clear plan laid out, and know exactly the direction we are wanting to go with it.Rkosi (talk) 15:35, 23 March 2018 (UTC)