Science: Sowing a Green Revolution

Shortly after he took charge of the Rockefeller Foundation's wheat-improvement program in Mexico 26 years ago, a young American plant pathologist named Norman E. Borlaug began a momentous series of cross-breeding experiments. With the germ plasm of plants from four different countries, he succeeded in developing a remarkable new kind of wheat that was able to flourish in all of Mexico's widely varied growing conditions. His work quickly put Mexico on the road to self-sufficiency in wheat production. But it had an even more important result: it sowed the seeds of the Green...