Plain English with Derek Thompson - Plain History: How Norman Borlaug Stopped the Apocalypse

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

In every generation, important people predict that the end is near and the apocalypse is coming. In the 1960s, the fear was that population growth would destroy the planet—that fertility would outrun the food supply, and hundreds of millions of people would starve to death. The most famous warning was 'The Population Bomb,' a bestselling book published in 1968 by Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich, which claimed "the battle to feed all of humanity is over" and “hundreds of millions of people would starve to death” in the 1970s. But then the 1970s came and went. And global famine deaths didn’t rise. They declined by 90 percent. In the 1980s, deaths from world hunger fell again. And again in the 1990s. And again in the 2000s. The apocalypse that everybody said was coming never came. And the reason is, basically, we invented super wheat. In the 1950s and 1960s, a plant pathologist named Norman Borlaug, working in Mexico on fungus-resistant wheat on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, managed to create a breed of wheat that was super abundant, efficient, and disease-resistant. His work kickstarted what’s known as the Green Revolution, a movement whose discoveries are responsible for keeping roughly half the planet alive. In 2007, when Borlaug was 93, The Wall Street Journal editorialized that he had “arguably saved more lives than anyone in history. Maybe one billion.” Today’s guest is Charles C. Mann, a journalist and author. We talk about the long history of the Green Revolution. Who was Norman Borlaug? What did he actually do? How did he do it? What does his accomplishment teach us about science, invention, and progress? We’re at a moment today when American science is being cut to the bone while foreign aid is being slashed. I sometimes hear the question: What is foreign aid really worth to us? I think it’s important to remember that Norman Borlaug was a foundation-funded scientist who didn’t do his most important work in air-conditioned labs at Harvard or Johns Hopkins. His breakthroughs came in lean-to shacks in Mexico, where he worked to improve harvests. Without Borlaug’s accomplishments, the world would look very different: Famines might trigger migration that destabilizes countries and transforms global politics. The world we have today, where countries like China and India can easily feed their huge populations, is a gift to global stability, to humanity, to America. It grew from the seed of a foreign agricultural support program. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Charles C. Mann Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All right, my birdie buddies, my car saving pals. My eagle enthusiast, it's Joe House here. Major season is finally upon us. The Masters, the PGA Championship, the U.S. Open, the Open Championship, and Fairway Rowan is here to break down all of the storylines. Offer a little help on those betting cards for every single major this golf season. Join me and our in-competing. comparable accomplice, our tour boots on the ground.

Nathan Hubbard, as we guide you from Augusta all the way to Northern Ireland, Royal Port Rush. Away we go. Today, a story about wheat. In every generation in history, it's trendy for people of a certain disposition to believe that the end is near, that the apocalypse is coming. In the 1950s and 1960s, one fear was that popular. growth would soon destroy the planet, that fertility would outrun the food supply,

and hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people, would soon starve to death. The most famous warning in this vein was the population bomb, a best-selling book published in 1968 by the Stanford ecologist Paul Erlich. It began with this statement, The battle to feed all of humanity is over. Erlick predicted that hundreds of millions of people would soon starve to death in the 1970s, and, quote, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate. The population bomb was not some esoteric tract. It was a massive bestseller,

and public intellectuals took it deathly seriously. Maybe they had good cause to. In the 1930s, more than 15 million people died a famine. In the 1940s, famine during World War II, extended across Europe and Asia, claiming 25, million lives. It just got worse from there. Thirty-six million people died of famines in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was logical then, maybe, to believe that continued population growth would soon result in the deaths of billions. But then the 1970s came and went, and global famine deaths

didn't skyrocket. They declined by 90%. In the 1980s, deaths from world hunger fell again. And again in the 1990s, and again in the 2000s. The apocalypse that everybody said was coming never came. And the reason why begins with the fact that we invented super wheat. In the 1950s and 1960s, a plant pathologist named Norman Borlaug, working in Mexico on fungus-resistant wheat on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, managed to create a breed of wheat that was super abundant, highly efficient, and disease-resistant.

His work kick-started what's known now as the Green Revolution, a movement whose discoveries are responsible for essentially keeping roughly half the planet alive. In 2007, when Borlaug was 93 years old, the Wall Street Journal editorialized that he had, quote, arguably saved more lives than anyone in world history. Maybe one billion, end quote. more than any person who's ever lived, you could say.

Norman Borlaug stopped an apocalypse. Today's guest is Charles C. Mann, a journalist and author. We talk about the long history of the Green Revolution. Who was Norman Borlaug? What did he actually do? How did he do it? What does his accomplishment teach us about science and invention and human progress? A final note on why we're doing this show now

and why this isn't some random dip into 20th century agricultural history. We're at a moment today when American science is at risk, while foreign aid is being cut. I sometimes hear the question, what is foreign aid really worth to us Americans? I think it's important to remember that Norman Borlaug was a foundation-funded scientist who didn't do his most important work in air-conditioned labs at Harvard or Johns Hopkins.

His breakthroughs came in Lean 2 Shacks in Mexico, where he worked to improve harvests. Without Borlaug's accomplishments, the world would look so different. Famines might trigger migration that destabilizes countries and transforms global politics. The world we have today, where countries like China and India can easily feed their huge populations and even in some cases export food is a gift to global stability, to humanity, to the United States. It grew from the seed of a foreign agricultural support program. And I think that's important to remember.

I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain History. Charles Seaman, welcome at the show. Oh, pleasure to be with you. The story I want to tell today is the story of the Green Revolution, how science and technology overcame scarcity to feed the planet. And we're going to spend most of our time on Norman Borlaug, who is one of these figures of history where if you're a typical news consumer, even one who's deeply curious about the 20th century,

you probably haven't heard of this guy. But if you have heard of Norman Borlaug, you probably consider him one of the most important figures in human history. But I don't want to talk about Norman Borlaug's biography first. I want you to tell us about another scientific breakthrough in the 20th century that set the stage for the green revolution. And this has to do with fertilizer. Charles, how does fertilizer work? And what role does nitrogen play in the process? Okay. You said right at the beginning when you talked to me that I could be nerdy. Because I have to tell you, immediately going to hit people with nerdy stuff. And this is just like meat, weeds right off the bat, Okay.

Fabulous. Okay. So, I mean, journalists have this expression, mego, right? My eyes glaze over. This is like right off the bat. Okay. Photosynthesis, which is how plants grow, is the most important chemical reaction in the world, right? Now, the weird thing about photosynthesis is that it's also probably the shittiest chemical reaction in the world.

in that it's just incredibly inefficient. It's like staggeringly inefficient. It's like point, and then there's a whole bunch of zeros, and then four, three percent efficient. And that's because of a whole bunch of reasons, but the most important of it is that it originated this completely bizarre way, which is that a couple billion years ago, some microorganism incorporated another microorganism

and it stays in there. And the function of these two microorganisms together, they sort of barely stay together. And it allows these plant cells to capture carbon dioxide from the air and water vapor in the air, break up the water, break up the carbon dioxide, and produce the hydrocarbons, or excuse me, hydrocarbohydrates that make up plants, the sugars and so forth. there is a catalyst for this that's called Rubisco. Now, Rubisco is also a terrible catalyst.

Typical catalyst is like something that facilitates a chemical process but isn't changed itself. It's like an army recruiter who brings in the recruits, sends them off, gets them ready, sends them off to the army, brings in the next recruits, but isn't changed itself. So it's a chemical entity that does this. There's tons of them in your body that are catalyzing. reactions, and they typically do thousands of reactions a second. Rubisco may be the worst catalyst on record. It does two or three per second. So the way that plants overcome this unbelievably inefficient Rube Goldberg system is by just making boatloads of Rubisco. So some plants are, their leaves are like 40% Rubisco. Now, the reason for going to do all this

is that Rubisco is basically made out of nitrogen. So plants need nitrogen. to make Rubisco, to overcome the terribleness of photosynthesis, and grow. Now, you think, like, this is not a problem, right? Because 70% of the atmosphere is nitrogen. But in this weird bit of bad luck, the nitrogen in the air is two nitrogen molecules stuck together so durably that plants simply don't have the energy to break them apart. the nitrogen has to be in other forms, which is called bioavailable. I mean, there's all this terrible jargon.

I'm just going to dip in and use a little bit of it. But this one, I think, isn't too bad. So it has to be bioavailable nitrogen. And that's what essentially fertilizer is, is bioavailable nitrogen. And most of the soil in the world doesn't have enough bioavailable nitrogen in it to let plants reach their potential. Now, in the 1840s, this is all realized by a guy named Justice von Liebig, this great chemist. And he said, aha, we need to make fertilizer and we'll unlock the potential of plant growth. Then they ran into a problem.

Nitrogen is really hard to separate. I want to punch down on two points here before we continue the story, because this is fabulous. Plants need nitrogen to grow. The air has a lot of nitrogen gas, N2, which is difficult to convert into use. useful nitrogen. And that's why plants rely on microorganisms in the soil to break down nitrogen into useful forms. This is sometimes called fixing nitrogen. The nitrogen gas is converted into something like ammonia, and the plants can use that for photosynthesis. The question facing scientists that we're teeing up here is, can we find a way to fix nitrogen more efficiently? Can we find a way

to essentially turn this ancient process of converting gaseous nitrogen into useful ammonia. Can we improve on the process that nature took billions of years to develop by bringing it inside of the lab? What happens next? So, it took decades and decades, but these two guys, these two German guys, Haber and Bosch, in the First World War, right at the end of the first World War and in the 20s figured out how to make ammonia cheaply and relatively simply in big factories. And that could be broken apart and made into fertilizer, the kind of liquid fertilizer that if you ever drive through rural areas, now you sometimes smell. So, Fritz Hobart was a chemist, and you can think of him as one of these great turn of the century figures like

Thomas Edison or Nikola Tesla, these guys who are sort of genius tinkerers. and what he was trying to do is figure out how to break up these nitrogen molecules. And he essentially did what Thomas Edison did for the light bulb. He tried a zillion different ways to do it, and he eventually came up with a catalyst, that because of these chemical complexities that he certainly did not understand at the time, temporarily makes it easier in certain conditions to break up the nitrogen. Now, he was able to do this in a laboratory. What Bosch did, which is, you know, working for these giant German chemical industries,

he figured out how to do this at a gigantic scale in a factory. And that's a whole different thing than, you know, some tiny tinkering in the laboratory. So one figured out the principle, one figured out how to make a lot of it. And they're both really important. And for that reason, they both got the Nobel Prize. So Haber and Bosch invent the process of synthesizing ammonia. And according to the researcher Vaklev Smil, 40% of the food grown in the world today uses synthetic ammonia,

which means that these two Germans essentially invented a process that feeds half the planet. It's almost like the rarest club in the world is the club of people who can be plausibly credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives. I think many historians and people who care about science and technology, and technological progress, put Fritz Haber and Karl Bosch in that category. Unfortunately, side note, morality is messy, and these guys also developed chemical weapons for the German army. So they were both miracle men and monsters.

But now we've covered the first part of the Green Revolution, which is fertilizer. The second part is advances in irrigation in 20th century. And the third part, which I consider most interesting here, is the invention of the perfect wheat. And this is a story that has at its heart the character of Norman Borlaug. Who was Norman Borlaug? Where was he born? How did he grow up? So Norman Borlaug was an Iowa farm boy. And he grew up in Saudi, Iowa, born right right during the First World War, right, in conditions of poverty that I think are unimaginable to most of your listeners.

he had to harvest a quarter million years of corn by hand, you know, starting at the time when he's six and shucking them up. And this is, I don't know if you've ever done anything like this, but this is an awful job where you're standing there with a, and these corn, the corn has these sharp edges. It cuts you up. There's all kinds of dust and flies. Every time you cut the stock, sap flies out, it's just, just a horrible job. And that's just one of the jobs that he had to do. It was just brutal, manual labor dawn to dusk all year long. Borlaug was lucky enough to be born at the time that the tractor was invented. And one of Henry Ford's biggest accomplishments was the Ford's son tractor, which was the first tractor that was cheap enough for really poor people to buy. And what it did was not only saved everybody a huge amount of labor, but it's increased the amount of land because

about 40% of the farmland in the United States was used to grow the hay and the oats and so forth needed by the oxen and the horses and all the draft animals. When you had a tractor to replace them, it was like your lands almost doubled. So it was a huge saving in labor. It was a huge saving in probability, and it allowed for the first time people like Borlaug to do things to go to high school. And even in Borlaug's case, he went to college on a wrestling scholarship. I mean, let's not get serious. Let's get serious here. It was really expensive, but he actually got to college.

And he got a PhD, which is mind-boggling to think of a guy from his background leaping, you know, into an advanced degree. in plant pathology. In your book, The Wizard and the Prophet, you write that Borlaug's life did not seem particularly distinguished in his first few years attending the University of Minnesota. I mean, this was a poor guy. He had to work as a janitor in order to work his way through college. It was difficult maybe to pluck him out of a crowd

as he's a sophomore or junior and say this might end up being one of the most important figures in scientific history. But his life is changed after attending a lecture that's delivered by Elvin Stakeman on black stem rust fungus. Charles, who is Elvin Stakeman and what is stem rust? Okay. Elvin is, again, one of these unknown figures who had an enormous impact on our lives. and he is one of the founders of plant pathology. And one of the things that I think it's really important is to say,

it's absolutely pointless to grow more and more wheat if it just gets eaten by disease. And the problem is that as you get more and more productive, you present, you know, your field presents an ever more juicy target for pests and diseases of all sorts. In India, for example, in the 1910, 1920, if you see pictures of wheat fields, what they'll show you is a plant here and then another one two feet away and then another one two feet away. And the reason is they're trying to say that if one of them gets infected by stem rust, you know, we'll have an empty space around it so maybe the others won't get infected. Now, obviously, if you go to a wheat field today, and I'm going to guess that even people in Manhattan have occasionally driven past. weed fields. You'll notice that there are not two-foot gaps or three-foot gap in between the crops,

in between the individual plants. And that's because we have people of plant pathologists who have developed treatments for these diseases and made it possible to crowd the plants together. And it's pretty clear that you're going to grow more food if you can put them just a few inches apart than if you can put each one two feet apart. So Stakeman was a key figure in this. And his particular thing was stem rust. And stem rust is an ancient plague of humanity. And one way to define the comfort of the world that we live in today is that I'm going to guess that 98% of the people listening to this podcast have never heard of stem rust before the words came out of your mouth. But it was something that everybody knew back in the day to the extent that the Romans actually

had a god of stem rust that people would propitiate hoping that it wouldn't come, sweep through the area and wipe people out. Stembrust is essentially a fungus, and it has a key factor in it. The spores in this fungus are extremely small. I'm not quite sure if they're visible to the naked eye. They're just right at the edge of that. They're just a few cells, you know, 50 cells or 100 cells, something like that. And the result is that when they release the spores, when the stem rust does, when can pick them up.

And they're so light, they can go way up in the air and go travel for hundreds of miles. And so when you were a Midwestern farmer at the time the Borlaug was growing up, every year, stem rust would blow up from Mexico, where it was warm and it didn't die during the winter, and go all the way up to Canada. and depending on the vagaries of the wind and the rain and, you know, what was happening in Mexico, sometimes it would be really, really bad and sometimes it wouldn't be so bad, but it was never gone. And so it was this constant unpredictable plague that caused enormous amounts of human misery. And our statement was one of the guys who ultimately ended up doing things like scientifically tracking it. And one of the jobs of the USDA is to monitor, outbreaks to try and understand it, and because it's constantly mutating to characterize these outbreaks

for treatment. So Stakeman is one of the guys that set this up. So young Norman Borlaug is developing this interest in agriculture and plant health. He is captivated by the problem of stem rust, this historic pestilence that we have lived with or plants have died from for thousands of years of human history and certainly maybe millions of years before that. Just before we get to the meat of our story here, which is Norman Borlaug in Mexico, I think we have to introduce the Rockefeller Foundation to our story. Plain history nerds will remember maybe a few weeks ago our conversation about the gilded age, the Robert Barron's of the late 19th century had a curious passion for philanthropy. And in 1913, the Standard Oil owner John D. Rockefeller creates the

Rockefeller Foundation with this enormous initial endowment, $100 million at a time when the federal budget was less than $1 billion. To put that in some perspective, today the federal budget is just shy of $7 trillion, which means a proportional endowment would be $600 billion, right? A new foundation created with an endowment of nearly more than half a trillion dollars. This is an enormous Foundation. And the 1940s, the Rockefeller Foundation decides that among the many things that it's funding, it wants to fund agricultural research in Mexico. Charles, why would the Rockefeller Foundation be interested in agriculture in Mexico? First, the Rockefeller Foundation had a strong interest in agriculture from the day it started. And that was because at that time, you know, 1913, agriculture

is the country's biggest industry. It's what most people do. And so there is this great feeling not entirely unjustified that a lot of American farmers don't know what they're doing. And at the very least, don't know what the research of people in the night, like I mentioned, just as Libig, and so about how to farm more effectively. And this is particularly true, I should say, on the Great Plains, where there's been this multiple waves of agricultural failure. And in fact, in the 1890s, there's droughts and so many problems that the frontier, so to speak, came back, and something like half the people in the Great Plains moved out of the Great Plains and back into places like Iowa. So it was a huge social problem, how to farm better, how to feed everybody.

and they played a big role in inventing what's now called the agricultural extension system. And that is that if you go, I live in Amherst, Massachusetts, the University of Massachusetts is what they call a land grant college, a whole series of colleges, colleges and universities established with money from land granted by Abraham Lincoln. And the agricultural extension service is a bureaucracy that, of agents that takes the research from the labs and brings it to the farmer. Scientific agriculture. It's, again, one of these little-known institutions that has a huge role in American society. So the Rockefeller Foundation starts that. So now, it's much later. It's the

late 30s, early 40s, and World War II is obviously about to happen. Many people believe that the U.S. is going to get involved in war. And down there in Mexico is a giant source of anxiety because Mexico can't feed itself. And this means that the Mexican government has been wildly unstable and there's a great fear that Nazis are going to take over. And the thing is, this fear isn't entirely, it's kind of crazy, but it's not entirely crazy in the sense that not actually literally German Nazis, but really bad people could take over a lie with the Nazis. And you're familiar with the idea that there's quite a few people who are worried about our southern border. I am. Just a bit. You may have heard about this. That was the version of it

in, say, 1941. It's like, oh, my God, what's it down there? And so the thought was, if we can help Mexico grow more food, the rural discontent that is at the base of much of the country's social instability will be alleviated, and maybe they won't invade us or alive with Germany or something like that. So how does Norman Borlaug get roped into this program funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to help the Mexican harvest in the hopes that this research might stave off the thread of fascism coming up through our southern border? How does Borlau get roped into this whole mess? It's really this kind of thing. The people involved in this, he didn't know anything about Mexico.

He didn't really know anything about what they were trying to do. And so the thought was, maybe what we can do is deal with stem rust, which is a huge problem down there. And it's a twofer because Mexican stem rust is a problem for farmers in the Middle West. If we can deal with them, everybody wins. So the idea is to bring in a plant pathologist. and they bring in Norman Borlaug sort of because he's like, oh, I've heard of this guy

in this completely half-assed way. So it's not quite random chance, but there's more of it than you would suspect for such a world-altering event. And Borlaug, I learned this from your book. Borlaug was still an acquaintance of Steakman, and Stakeman had been roped into Rockefeller efforts to improve the Mexican harvest as well.

So it's possible that he's just a part of this like, you know, this plant science nerd universe. And we were like, yeah, like we got a lot of like, yeah, which is rather small. We got a lot of eminent plant scientists that are working on this program. There's also, there's this little kid, Norman, who's just got his PhD, maybe we'll put him in charge of some like tertiary problem like stem rust in Mexico. I love the way that you dramatize just the extraordinary randomness. I think that's the right word, randomness of this accomplishment. You say in the book, you know, this is someone Norman Borlaug who knows nothing or very little about wheat, has never been to Mexico, doesn't speak Spanish.

I love these windows into history where if you've stopped the clock in 1944, it would have been so ludicrous for a journalist or writer to say, oh, this situation I just described, this young scientist who doesn't understand Mexico or wheat or speak Spanish, is on the precipice of one of the most important discoveries in human history that deals with Mexican wheat. Like, any more theatricality that you'd like to introduce to this scene before we move on to the moment of breakthrough? The crazy thing is retroactive, you know, from retrospectively, we look at this and say, oh, my gosh, it's so wild. But in fact, this was a tiny appendage. of the program because the rock-dollar people weren't stupid. What do Mexicans eat? Corn,

maize, right? And so the great bulk of the program was trying to deal with increasing maize production. And it's sort of at the last minute, you know, a statement was involved. They said, well, some of those Mexicans, they also make wheat and it's this problem here. Let's bring on somebody to do that. And he has like no budget. And they're paying so little attention. They don't, realize, like you said, he doesn't speak Spanish. He's never worked with wheat. He's also never bred plants. He's really the wrong guy for the job. It is a little bit like if in World War II there was some major process to say invent radar at MIT. And they told one little scientist to like go away and figure out what the implications of atom splitting were. And like,

just alone, he, like, figured out how to build a nuclear weapon. It's like, you put, like, one little scientist in charge of, like, a tertiary project, and he ends up coming up with a thing that's way more important than the main project. It's a funny bit of history. So in your telling of the story, Borlaug succeeds where no one else before him succeeded because he takes on this task that's so laborious, so frankly boring and yet audacious that his achievement is unprecedented. He essentially says, I'm going to try to find a lot of.

find a way to fight off stem rust, to figure out, you know, in my little shack in Mexico, a way to make Mexican wheat impervious to stem rust. And to do that, I'm going to collect hundreds of varieties of wheat, and I'll breed them together in every possible combination to create the perfect wheat hybrid that cannot get sick from this ancient fungus. In practical terms, you write in your book, that this boils down to Norman Borlaug and a couple of assistants sitting on these little rickety stools in the hot Mexican sun and painstakingly cross-breeding wheat. Because the work that they're doing ends up being so unbelievably important, I actually would like you to take us into that shack onto those stools and tell me, how does this actually

work? What would I be doing if I was one of Norman Borlaug's assistants in the 1940s, 1950s, cross-breeding every possible variety of wheat. So the first thing that you should understand is you would not be working in a laboratory. You would not be in air-conditioned space. You would not have advanced tools because he had no budget. He literally was working in a lean-to shack. Okay. And basically the only tools that he had was a pair of tweezers and a hat.

the hat for the sun, the tweezers for everything else. And so wheat has these flowers, they're called for it. And like a lot of flowers, they have both male and female parts. And I think I'm just going to talk about them that way, rather than introducing stamens and pistols and all these kinds of things, because your poor viewers have probably had so much nerdiness now. that they'll be grateful, just I say, they have a boy parts and girl parts. And the boy parts produce pollen, you know, the little yellow sprinkly stuff.

And the girl parts have the plant equivalent of a vagina. And each of these has an elaborate Latin name that I'm not inflicting on you guys. And so to cross-breed them successfully, what you have to do is take all these different varieties. And they're just not characterized genetically. They're like farmers who say, oh, this is the Schmedlap variety and this is the Vlorist variety and this is this that have slightly different characteristics. You then strip off the male parts from half of them and put them. So they're now only female plants.

And you put little pieces of paper. held by paper clips. And you have to do this to the living plant. So you're in the field. You pull off the mail parts with your tweezers on every flower of every plant. And you put little tiny pieces of paper over them, like little envelopes clipped on

that to prevent pollen from floating around and impregnating them, so to speak. Then you take the other plant that you have, want and you shake off the pollen, which is this little dust-like stuff, you go back to the original ones, and then you sprinkle the pollen one by one. You take off the little envelope, you sprinkle the pollen on one by one, and then you put the plant of the thing back on so that more pollen doesn't float in. Meanwhile, you've also done the same to this. So you have males

and females from each. And I want to say they did this hundreds of thousands of times. Because if we had several hundred, I think about 600 ultimately different varieties, and they crossed 600 different varieties multiple times with each one of the other 600 varieties, which rapidly gets you up into tens of thousands. And then they would take the crosses in the next season and do it. cross the crosses if you did this year after year and the reason that nobody had thought to do this is because it's kind of insane it's just when i talked to agricultural researchers who are

writing this book and i got to this part they would all say something like do you know how crazy that is do you know how horrible that was it's a hundred degrees and you're with your little tweezers eight hours a day, day after day after day after day. And there isn't like an air-conditioned lab, you know, nearby. He, like, has a bottle of water, maybe. So it was just awful work. Then you have to individually harvest each cross, write down what everything is, and keep track of all this.

Again, no computers. You're doing this, you know, with those notebooks, those black speckled notebooks that your parents used to take S-N in high school, it's just unbelievably awful, and then keeping them all on a crude wooden bench. It's just mind-boggling what he did. As a matter of science history, I think it's important to just pause the story here and note that

whether it's Edison with a light bulb, or Fritz Haber with nitrogen fixing, or Norman Borlaug with wheat crossbreeds, fundamentally what we're talking about here are people just throwing shit at the wall. We think about like the light bulb moment, so to speak, is supposed to represent a eureka that's sort of like induced in the mind

where people are like, oh my God, I just realized some truth about the world, like Archimedes getting out of his bathtub. But I think it's really important as a matter of scientific history to point out how many breakthroughs are just people with an enormous patience for boredom, throwing failure after failure after failure at a wall,

and then at the end of that process, coming up with a product that changes the world. I think that's just like an important theme of history to pull out here before we continue with the story, because there is a lot to go with. Yes, it's true in science in general. Good scientists have the capacity to do things for days on end that 99% of the world find screamingly dull.

And, you know, whether it is carefully counting, you know, the cells in the test tube or carefully checking every single drop along the way, it's something you have to, the ability to take pains is vastly underrated as a source of scientific brilliance. And Borlaug had an enormous ability to take pains and enormous ability to, as you said, endure failure. Because what he did at the end of the first time, after investing this huge amount of labor, He took all the crosses. He put them in a field, grew, and watched stem rust wipe them out. And 99% of them were just wiped out by stem rust. So then he took the survivors, and then he crossbred them again with all these 600. And the hope is that gradually you build up something that has real resistance.

And that's, in fact, what he did. And the amazing thing is, while he did that, he didn't just do that. doubled his workload. In other words, you would think like, oh, well, at least he'll take the winter off. What he did was he said, wait, I can go to the far northern part of Mexico to Sonora in the northwest corner of Mexico where the climate is quite different, and I can have both spring wheat and fall wheat. So in other words, I can get a second crop so I can do this thing all over again and accelerate breeding. Now, here is also another thing that I think is often unappreciated, which is the role

of ignorance. Because he had never bred wheat and done any kind of plant breeding, he didn't know that if you actually opened up a textbook about plant breeding of the kind that was in the University of Minnesota and the courses that he actually didn't take, you would find out you can't do this. The dogma at the time was you have to develop the crop in the area in which it will be grown. And the Bahia, which is the area in Central Mexico, where he is based, and Sonora are very different. They're separated by, you know, more than a thousand miles and the climate is quite different.

And so textbooks would tell you, you cannot do this. And the textbooks would be right, except that we'll get into this later. the reason for them believing this is there are things like, sorry for the jargon, photo periodicity. And that is, plants, including wheat, often rely, have little calendars, and they know when to blossom by the length of the day. And the length of the day in the south part of Mexico, you know, in the Bahia, and the length of the day in Sonora are different. and so they would be out of sync with each other. Borlaug didn't know any of that, and he proceeded anyway in doing something

that any expert would have told who it was crazy. And in fact, a plant breeding expert did come in, sort of late in the day, and tried to get him fired because he was so incompetent because he obviously didn't know about this basic principle of plant breeding. With crossbreeding, Borlaug manages to succeed in creating a wheat variety that's incredibly downful, right?

With all of this laborious work, he creates this wheat plant that flowers enormously. But the problem with that is that if you build a plant with a ton of flowers and it grows too tall, it's going to fall over.

It's almost like the way I thought about it as I was reading the book is like through all of this work that you're describing, he managed to crossbreed an elephant and a flamingo, right? So this animal had like this enormous head

of flour that we actually use to make bread, but it was on the legs, the stalk, so to speak, of this tiny little flamingo, and so it would just fall over. And guess what the value is of a wheat that falls over? It's absolutely nothing, and it's going to crash into the wheat next to it and make that one fall over.

And so this isn't actually a success. It's actually a tremendous failure. It's called lodging, I learned from your book. How does Borlaug take his accomplishment, which is, okay, I found a way to use all of this crossbreeding to create a wheat flower that's huge, but I need to find some way to keep it standing. How does he solve the problem of lodging in wheat? So the way he does this is to take advantage of something that botanists and plant scientists

do is a kind of quirk of history, which is make big collections of plant varieties and seeds. And these storehouses, herbariums and the like, or is it herbaria? I don't know. You have to get your resident Latin next to edit it, so I say the right one. Anyway, they collect all these seeds. And 99% of the time, this is pointless stamp collecting pedantry. But every now and then, it's tremendously valuable. And what had happened is that by chance, there is a variety of very short wheat developed by these Japanese people as a result of a natural mutation that was short and had thick stocks. It didn't yield very much. It was pretty terrible in all these other ways, but it was kind of interesting because it was so short. And because plant scientists like

collecting these things, I mean, this is like an unusually colored stamp or something like that, they had them. And so when Borlaug went out and sent out his somebody said, huh, I saw these very short stalks. I wonder if you'd be interested in that. And they sent to him. And he crossbred them in this, again, this extremely laborious process. And what he got was stout, short, stout wheat that could handle this enormous increase in the flowering and the yield.

And one of the ways of decided is that at the time, that Borlaug started, typically the weight of the seed, you know, the grain, the part that you eat, the good part, was about 20% of the above-ground mass of the plant. And it's called the harvest indexed. And it had a harvest index of, you know, of 20%. Now it's really close to 50%. And same plant, same amount of nutrients and everything, but 50% of it by weight is the good part. And that's a huge deal. Right. What's so important about this is like short stalks with big bushels of flour at the top, it's much more efficient, right? More for the same amount of water and the same nutrients that you're putting into the plant, you're getting much more harvestable wheat. So he's managed to create this like best of all possible world's wheat variety. It flowers enormously, but it's got like really like

the equivalent of like thick legs that can hold up the head. But one takeaway from your book that I thing is really important, right? Is that plant science is very complicated. And I want to see if we can distill the problem that Borlaug solves. And to tell me how sort of how this sits with you. So Borlaug gradually realizes that the wheat problem in Mexico is really threefold. It's three interlocking problems. It's flowering. It's lodging and it's rust. So if you breed for bountiful wheat flowers and the wheat falls over, okay, that's worth nothing. So his solution is, will breed for thick stalks. Okay, now you've got thick stalks,

bountiful wheat flowers, but the problem with having a sort of like genetically simple wheat is that it needs to withstand several strains of fungus that are going to sweep through the area. It's a little bit like if you have a padlock and that padlock only has one number on it, you can keep changing the number, but it's easy to hack because some,

like the fungus, so to speak, is just going to scroll through the numbers and quickly figure out how do I infect the flower? How do I feed in the flower and thus destroy the harvest? So maybe the most important problem that Borlaug solves isn't just the fact that the flowering is bountiful and that the stock is thick, but also it's that he finds some way to create a kind of botanical padlock with many numbers on it that's harder for the fungus to crack. Do you have a way of describing how he's? he does this, or is it still just more trial and error? I have more patience than God. I'm going to find some way to crossbreed all of these wheat varieties to create like the perfect wheat for the world.

So by now, and we're talking, again, we're making it sound like this was a couple years. You know, this is, you know, more than 10 years. You know, think of it as going from the early 40s to the late 50s. So you're, you're, you're, you're, dealing with just enormous amounts of cross-breed. And during that time, he begins to recognize that certain varieties are resistant to stem rust. And even more, he's even seeing the patterns. Because stem rust, thanks to Ellen Stakeman, people can characterize the different strains. And they give them numbers, aims, and so forth.

And so it's like, this variety, you know, which we'll call 1006, is resistant to variety 17 of stem rust, but not variety 19. And so forth. So he has tables like that. And what he does is by multiple years of crossbreeding and by doing this on a huge scale, he keeps rolling the dice because there's a you only get half the genes from each parent. He doesn't know about genetics. So he doesn't know this, but we do. You don't get all the genes. So there's a chance that you won't get the resistance genes, whatever they are. And so the only way to do this is by throwing many, many darts at the bullseye, and he does this over years, and he builds in multiple levels

of resistance through this mechanism that he doesn't understand, except that he is certain that he can see the results. Also wins another big lottery thing. In that, by accident, he discovers that some of the wheat varieties it gets are what they call, and this is the worst piece of jargon I'm going to give you in this, I promise, photo period insensitive, meaning they don't have these alarm clocks built in. They just bloom when the temperature's right. That means that the dog is wrong and you can breed what you call universal wheat. You can breed a wheat that you can breed a wheat that does just as well in Nebraska as it does in Mexico City. And that means that you can start solving problems for the entire world in your lab in Mexico.

And Borlaug realizes this, that he's got something. And the Rockefeller Foundation also realizes this because they're desperate to do something after the calamitous failure of this base project. So Borlaug invents universal wheat. It is abundant. It's steady on its feet. It's resistant to stem rust and other fungi, I assume. And it's photo-insensitive.

It has this ability to grow essentially wherever it's planted. It's like a universal electrical socket. You just plug it in and it automatically works. I love your description of the resulting breakthrough. And I'm going to quote you from your book, The Wizard and the Prophet, and then hand the mic back to you to talk about just how important this accomplishment is for the world. Quote, in the ass end of nowhere, Borlaug and his Mexican team had created something new to the

world, an all-purpose wheat, short, fecund, and disease-resistant, it could be sown in soil rich or poor anywhere in Mexico and produce well. Borlaug would think of these new, high-yielding seeds as part of a package, the other pieces being adequate nutrients and water management. Quick aside, that's why we talked about nitrogen, fertilizer, and irrigation earlier in the show. Back to your quote, the package was turnkey, ready for use, switch it on and yield to its skyrocket. It would make all the world in Iowa. End quote. I love that. He created a wheat that would make all the world in Iowa. How would you say Borlaug's wheat changed the world?

What did it in a couple ways. One is, obviously, it was hugely important that you could in a place like Mexico or most of the world, where at the time, it's important to remember that the new United Nations was just doing the first sort of global surveys of human well-being and somewhere between 40 and 60% of the world was malnourished. humankind was literally unable to feed itself. And this is the way the human condition had been as far back as history goes, that everybody was subject to food insecurity, and that 40 to 60 percent of people at any one time, you know, during the year, we're not going to get enough to eat. And if you can take the world's most common cereal at the time, wheat,

and double, triple, even quadruple with yield, this is an enormous event in human history. It also had a secondary effect. And this is, I guess I'm helplessly diving back into the nerdy stuff. So I apologize. At this point, at this point, I think we have to assume that it's allowed. We're 50 minutes into the podcast. If anyone's still with us, they're a real sicko.

Well, this is one of those weirdly nerdy things that's actually very important. there was a model when this came out of what's called development economics. There was an idea about how, if you were a poor nation, like most of the world was at that time, how you as a nation would become wealthy and become like England. And that is, you would industrialize. And you would get rid of this backward agriculture, or they use backward stagnant and stuff like this, and get as many people off the farm as possible so they could work in factories, and make widgets and have factory jobs and make you a mighty and powerful nation.

And so agriculture, even though it was the world's most important industry and the world's biggest employer and the poverty of agriculture was the reason most people were poor in the world, it was like this deprecated thing. And so nations like India had ministries of steel and ministries of concrete and ministries of coal, and then the agriculture, which is what 90% of Indians did, was this sort of thing that we can extract money and people from it and use it to build something good. Norman Borlaug produced a technical innovation that suddenly glamorized agriculture and made people realize that you could do something here and force the switching of focus to doing

things that they should have been doing anywhere, like building fertilizer plants and improving irrigation. So there was a real technical accomplishment, but there is also a PR-type accomplishment in getting countries like India, like China, that had focused on steel and cement and things like that, to focus on feeding their people. And that was a really good thing. And Borlaug was very conscious about that. As you write, in the 1970s, much of South and East Asia was plagued with hunger. You had tens of millions of people dying of famines up through the 1950s, 1960s. Today, in the 21st century, Asians have, on average, 30% more calories in their diet than they did 50, 60 years ago, despite the fact that populations have boomed in this part of the world.

We've just become so successful at growing abundant wheat and rice. And I just want to allow you to talk a little bit about how the Borlaug, accomplishment was extended to rice in Southeast Asia as well. Because today, you know, places like Jakarta, Shanghai, like everything that you see, the skyscrapers and the beautiful hotels and the streets and the neon lights, all of this, to your point, is built on a foundation of lab-bred rice, of scientists and agriculturalists extending the Borlaug principle to rice and Asia.

So talk a little bit about how these lessons were actually applied there. So the Rockefeller Foundation, they're not stupid there. They said, wow, this is amazing. And they thought there's a method here that if we do this extensive breeding and we give the people

maybe more than tweezers to do it, we can maybe accomplish exactly the same thing with rice, which is the world's most important food because that's what feeds Asia. They pooled together with the Ford Foundation, and they created the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, it's south of Manila. And because they had learned from Borlaug and because they had more tools and so forth, they were able to replicate the Borlaug's process with rice much faster than Borlaug was able to do it by sitting in little stools and so forth.

And they also had the advantage at the time of knowing what DNA was and things like that. So they created what's called IR8, which is, you know, it sounds very strange to say, but it's a rice that literally changed the world. And IRA was then sent to various nations, China, India, and so forth. And then, you know, fleaked around a little bit for local sensibilities because people like different colors of rice and people like different textures and so forth. And it became, the same thing happened, this doubling, tripling, even quadrupling of rice yields. And when I was growing up, I'm like really ancient, but I'm not that ancient. And my parents said to me, eat your food. There's kids starving in India or kids starving in China.

And it was literally true. Now, not so much. There was a terrible famine in India, in dealing with the bad monsoons and things like that. in the early 1970s was part of what fed this panic about, you know, the world not being, you know, falling apart and too many people and all that sort of stuff. There was a similar one in the 90s, you know, roughly similar malfunctioning the monsoon. And nobody's ever heard of it because in the interim, India and Pakistan and Bangladesh had developed these rice that were able to weather this kind of natural variation. And it was a huge triumph. I mean, India exports rice.

India exports wheat. It's a really amazing thing. It's a great thing. And it really happened because of this development by Borlaug and because he was able and the people with him to use it to champion agriculture and get these nations to focus on it. I should say the same thing actually to some extent happen to the United States as well. We benefited from the Green Revolution.

When you go to Iowa, that's Green. revolution products and all this elaborate mechanisms that go go around it also are because we can this these successes help convince the Eisenhower administration the truant administration people like that we need to pay attention to agriculture in 2007 when borlaug was 93 years old the wall street journal wrote that he quote arguably saved more lives than anyone in history maybe one billion end quote do you think that norman borlaug has a case of being the person who did the most good of any single individual in the last 100 years? Sure. I'll tell you, I didn't meet Borlaug very many times, but I did on one occasion.

And, you know, I was, obviously he's an enormously important guy and I was kind of intimidated. But at the end, I picked up my courage and stepped out of my journalist's role. And I said, Dr. Borla, can I ask you like a really stupid question? Okay. And I said, I told him what the Wall Street Journal said. And I said, what do you think when you hear that? And he was a modest guy. I mean, he was not a, you know, a preening type of guy at all.

And he said, look, it wasn't just me. There are so many people that did this, you know. I, like, you know, did this, but, you know, there are people all over the world, particularly a guy in India named Swami Nathan, who I talk about in the book, who are really, really important. And I said, okay, okay, suppose the Wall Street Journal is off by a factor of 10, which is a lot, order of magnitude, and you personally are only responsible for saving a hundred million lives.

You know, how does that feel? And he said, you know what? It feels pretty good. I love the story. I love Norman Borlaug. Why do you think we should care outside of the obvious? Like surely there's a kind of utilitarian case here that someone's discovery made possible the lives of a hundred million or billion people. We should celebrate it. I also think that the method by which he discovered this miracle wheat, this incredible trial and error method, teaches us something about science and discovery often being. a process of patience rather than a process of sudden insight. What are the most important lessons do you think of the story of Norman Borlaug for today? Well, for citizens, I think the most

important thing is to recognize that the agricultural system that we have today, the thing that provides the food that we live on, is a modern creation. It's a system that was built within our lifetimes, and it's one that's in need of constant improvement and maintenance. And it's something we should know about as citizens because we're going to have to keep doing this. If the world's population goes up by 2050 to something on the order of 10 billion, probably a little bit less, but something on the order of 10 billion, as most people will expect, and as most economists suspect those people are going to be more affluent, which we all devoutly hope, we're going to have to grow, you know, somewhere between 30 and 50% more food. We're going to need another green

revolution, and we're going to need to be conscious about how we're doing it. And so these systems that we've built are incredible, but they can fall apart. They, you know, there are always one, you know, what's the line? They're always one generation from collapse. So we have this progress, but it's not something that's purely in the past. It's something that we have a responsibility as citizens to make sure that we maintain. And so, you know, as voters, we should actually know whether the United States is continuing to invest in agricultural research. We should know whether projects to prevent stem rust in Mexico are still being funded.

We should know whether the agricultural extensions are. And we should support, I believe, I think we should know that as citizens. And I would argue that we should support efforts to really do these kind of moonshot programs in agriculture, one of which I described in the book, which is the C4 Rice Initiative, which is an attempt to change the way that photosystems works in rice. Because the issue with producing 30 to 50 percent more food is that we really don't have 30 to 50 percent more Earth to grow it in.

So we're going to have to be extremely clever as how to do. do it. There just isn't that much more good farmland to be used. And so we have a big challenge ahead of us. I think that it's a doable challenge, but I don't think it's an easy one. And it would be way easier for the people working on it if there is public support. Charles, the Green Revolution isn't over. New threats to food will emerge. New famine risks will emerge. What are those risks today? And where are they? So those threats are not theoretical. at least two of them are here right here today. One of them is our old friend's stem rust.

I believe the origin of this new mutation is East Africa. I'm not sure, but in that general area, it is a terribly difficult variant. We don't really know what to do about it. I would argue that cutting agricultural research right now is particularly inopportune, and some of that is happening. The second is a longer-term threat. It's a weed also from East Africa called striga. it's a parasitic weed.

It's like a super ingenious natural killing machine. What is these tiny, tiny seeds that are only like 50 cells do as they grow a root-like organ called a hostatorium. It goes underneath the surface. It hits the root of the wheat, barley, maize, whatever it is, sucks the life out of it, then pops up above the surface. So it's killed your crop even before you see it. Nobody knows what to do about it.

Jet travel is surely going to bring it to the United States and the way the diseases travel nowadays. There's a small outbreak. I think it's in Tennessee that the U.S. government has spent about $100 million failing to contain. These threats are real, and we need to keep the system going

so we can pay attention to them. I love the way you tell the story that between Haber and Bosch, the modern water pump, Borlaug, Swama Nathan, India, the image that fills my head is progress as this human pyramid that we keep needing to build up. Maintenance is important because stasis is not an option here. Problems will keep presenting themselves. And so we'll have to have another green revolution on top of another green revolution

and maybe another one after that. I think it's an incredibly inspiring message and a daunting one, and I find it very galvanizing. So Charles Seaman, thank you so much. Well, thank you. Thank you. It's a pleasure talking to you. Many thanks to Charles C. Mann for this absolutely marvelous story. I've known about Norman Borlaug. I feel like I've talked about Norman Borlaug with friends of mine and sort of the progress world. But going deeply with a scholar like this on how a person plausibly credited with saving one billion lives actually did that work. like what the minutes of that work looked like in the 1950s and 1960s, when he's coming up with wheat that's going to feed eventually roughly half the planet.

I just find it intrinsically thrilling, and I hope that other people do too. I think one lesson of this, which I don't want to be political, is that science is hard. Science is very, very hard. There's no way to practice science in a way that is perfectly efficient. The Rockefeller Foundation program in Mexico was in some ways largely a failure, as Charles Seaman said. Many efforts to improve corn harvests that the Rockefeller Foundation was initially trying to do in Mexico, given that mazes was the dominant crop of the country, utterly failed.

And so looked at from a certain angle, the Rockefeller Foundation's agricultural research programs south of the border were pathetic in their inability to do what the foundation wanted. And yet here was Norman working on this side project to maybe discover some little thing about stem rust. And that tiny little project ends up becoming, you know, the home run that scores a thousand runs. I think it's an absolutely marvelous story. And thank you for being here for it as I learned from Charles and learned from Norman as well. We'll talk to you next week.