An
agronomist who fights world hunger, Borlaug won the
Nobel Peace Prize in
1970 and teaches at
Texas A&M at the age of 86. He is the father of the "
Green Revolution," the dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity that began in the
1960s.
Borlaug grew up on a small farm in Iowa and graduated from the University of Minnesota, where he studied forestry and plant pathology, in the 1930s. In 1944, the Rockefeller Foundation invited him to work on a project to boost wheat production in Mexico, which had been importing most of its grain. Borlaug and his staff in Mexico spent nearly 20 years breeding the high-yield dwarf wheat that sparked the Green Revolution, the transformation that forestalled the mass starvation predicted by neo-Malthusians.
Edit: He died on September 12, 2009.