CITIZEN OF THE WORLD

At Borlaug’s 90th birthday party earlier this year, Colin Powell led the singing of “Happy Birthday” in his honor. But, according to Quinn, when Peter Jennings came to interview Borlaug, he had already left for Africa.

Borlaug divides his time between Mexico, where he is a senior consultant at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center; Texas, where he is a Distinguished Professor of International Agriculture at Texas A&M; and Africa, where he is president of the Sasakawa Africa Association.

In Africa, he’s trying to duplicate the success he had in combatting hunger in South Asia.

“A Japanese industrialist called him 16 years ago when he was thinking of retiring [and] asked why [progress in combatting hunger hadn’t been made] in Africa,” says Borlaug’s nephew, Ted Behrens, who founded the Heritage Foundation.

But Dowswell says that the African project has not had the same success as the South Asian campaign because Africa still does not have the infrastructure that India and Pakistan had in the 1960s.

ROOTS

Borlaug, who has received 54 honerary doctorate degrees, grew up on a farm, and spent his first eight years of school in a one-room schoolhouse near Cresco, Iowa.

“[He] grew up in the depression, influenced by those early years,” Behrens says.

Borlaug was a Big 10 wrestler at the University of Minnesota, and was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1992.

He received a B.A. in forest management from the University of Minnesota, but according to Becker, he returned to the college when a job fell through.

Becker, the editor of the Cresco Times Plain Dealer, says that Borlaug was so taken by a seminar at the University of Minnesota on the genetics of grain that he decided to dedicate his life to science.

“He had a great desire to make a difference,” Behrens says. “He could be a very wealthy man if he wanted it. He passed it all on to others.”

—Staff writer Joseph M. Tartakoff can be reached at tartakof@fas.harvard.edu.