Yuan Longping: "Children, I'm leaving! You must eat well."

A person who lives in the noisy world will either strive to catch up or sink into the world. However, people always strive to leave something in the world to prove that they have been here and be connected with the vast universe and vastness. Compared with the ocean, human beings are just a drop in the ocean.

Just like this old man, he dedicated his life to the dream he had in his youth of "rice as high as sorghum, ears as long as brooms, and grains as big as peanuts."

At the age of 60, after working hard all his life, he should have enjoyed the happiness of his family and taken care of himself in his old age, but he still traveled between the chaff farmhouses and the grassy paddy fields. His busy back, wrapped in sweat, was deeply engraved in the sparkling fields. He was hunched over until the moment the pendulum of life stopped.

He once wrote in his article:

An old man who was determined to solve the problem of food and clothing for the whole world resolutely embarked on a journey of living with rice as a companion and as a friend of millet. Living alone, he once said that the person he felt most sorry for was her mother. He failed to fulfill his filial piety, which became his biggest regret in life. Now, he could finally go to see the mother whom she missed so much with peace of mind.

This person is Yuan Longping, a scientist who was named the "Father of Hybrid Rice in the World", a devotee who won the medal of the Republic of China, and a kind old man who is approachable and never puts on airs. .

"A grain of grain can save a country, or it can stumble a country. You young people have never experienced famine, so you don't know. People starved to death during the famine in the last century. No one has enough to eat, I have seen it with my own eyes."

Yuan Longping would cry with emotion every time he talked about those turbulent and difficult years. He had experienced those days and knew that there were many people who did not have enough food. Eat and lose your life.

His childhood was spent during the years when the Japanese invaders bombed Chongqing, so whenever he recalled this period of history, he would be extremely nervous and excited. He knew very well that the weak would eat the strong, and those who fell behind would be beaten. He also determined from then on to dedicate his life to making China strong!

On September 1, 1930, Yuan Longping was born in a delivery room of Peking Union Medical College Hospital. He was the second boy born to Ms. Hua Jing and Mr. Yuan Xinlie. According to the Yuan family genealogy, he was ranked with the character "Long". , so his father Yuan Xinlie named him Longping.

Yuan Longping’s childhood life was colorful. His father was a typical intellectual who often taught Yuan Longping how to read and practice calligraphy. His mother was a kind and intelligent woman who often told her children about the creation and hard work of Emperor Yan. The story of planting grains and the hard work of Cowherd and Weaver Girl laid a solid foundation for Yuan Longping's ideal.

Yuan Longping should have had a wonderful childhood, but the indiscriminate bombing by the invaders ended Yuan Longping’s youthful dreams and reveries. After the July 7th Incident, many compatriots who did not want to be slaves to the country’s subjugation helped the old and the young. , began to flee to the rear, and Yuan Longping also moved around with his parents and sisters.

During this period of his life, Yuan Longping once recalled this:

In Chongqing, he saw with his own eyes the tall buildings and beautiful mountain cities turned into a sea of ??flames under the pouring of Japanese bombs. Everywhere was unrecognizable, houses collapsed, and corpses littered the fields. It was also from this time that Yuan Longping determined to become a useful talent who could share the joys and sorrows with the people of the motherland.

In 1948, Yuan Longping’s family came to Nanjing. His early experiences and ideals made the 19-year-old resolutely apply for the Agricultural Department of Chongqing Xianghui College despite his father’s opposition. Later, the school was renamed Southwest Agricultural College. , Yuan Longping opened the door to his life by determined to learn agriculture.

In 1953, Yuan Longping graduated from Southwest Agricultural College. After graduating from college, Yuan Longping responded to the call issued by the school and the country and decided to go to the grassroots level, to the countryside, to the difficult places, and to the places where the motherland needs it most. , he resolutely filled in the name of Anjiang Agricultural School in Xiangxi, the most remote place in Hunan Province, on his graduation application form, and stayed here for 16 years.

When Yuan Longping was young, he often compared himself to a rice seed. Since it is a seed, it will take root and sprout wherever it is scattered.

Anjiang Agricultural School, located in the deep mountains of western Hunan, gradually gave Yuan Longping a taste for crops. He always led the students to start careers in the rice fields. Yuan Longping stayed with the land willingly. He loves the land, and the friction between his feet and the soil makes him feel very comfortable.

During his tenure as a teacher, he experienced three years of natural disasters, which caused three years of famine. The wind of hunger soon blew into western Hunan, sweeping away Qianyang City, and also blew into the city where Yuan Longping was located. Anjiang Agricultural School.

In 1961, at the Anjiang Agricultural School where Yuan Longping was located, teachers and students lived on only five or six rations of food every day. There was no oil, water or non-staple food. Almost all teachers and students were hungry every day, including Yuan Longping. Inside.

In that famine era, Yuan Longping witnessed tragic scenes: disease, hunger, pain and death. That period of solidified history became the driving force for Yuan Longping's progress. Yuan Longping looked at the students' faces. The loneliness on the ground, looking at the corpse lying on the ground, made him truly understand for the first time what it meant that food was the first necessity for the people.

Since 1960, Yuan Longping began to take artificial hybridization experiments as his own scientific research topic, and started experiments on half an acre of land allocated to him by the school.

In July 1961, when Yuan Longping was inspecting the rice he had planted, he suddenly discovered a rice ear that stood out from the crowd. This rice ear was pretty and tall, as big as the palm of his hand. This discovery For Yuan Longping, who was unable to do anything at the time, it was like dew after a long drought, and it was this accidental discovery that ultimately affected his life.

He carefully collected the 170 rice seeds produced by this rice plant and planted them in earthen pot culture soil the next year, trying to cultivate more rice with full ears, but this experiment The result was a huge disappointment to him. The seedling that had an obvious advantage actually reversed course and obviously failed.

It was from this experiment that Yuan Longping realized for the first time that this rice was likely to be a natural hybrid rice.

Inspiration began to flash in his mind. It would be great if hybrid rice could be artificially cultivated. Then the yield of rice would be greatly increased, and the problem of food and clothing for human beings could be solved. Using this hybrid advantage to improve The idea of ??rice production was born in his mind.

However, his idea was contrary to the traditional view of classical genetics. When Yuan Longping proposed this plan, he was opposed and even ridiculed by many authoritative scholars, and some even said he was ignorant.

Despite this, Yuan Longping did not give up his persistence amidst the skepticism and still insisted on treating rice hybridization as his scientific research goal. < /p>

These words touched Yuan Longping greatly. His childhood pastoral dream was intertwined with the smoke of the war that had gone away. Coupled with the expectations of the Chinese people, Yuan Longping was determined to solve everyone's food and clothing problem from the root. So he also accelerated his research speed.

Soon, he learned from a journal that genetics had made a major breakthrough in theory. He was deeply attracted by Mendel's and Morgan's theories of inheritance, and he decided to use their theories in scientific experiments. Explore.

Although the summer in the south is scorching hot, it is also the season when rice flowers are blooming. Yuan Longping just stands in the paddy field with his waist bent all day long, planting a single male sterile plant in the rice field. One can imagine the intensity and difficulty of the work of identifying individual plants and ears.

In this way, until 1965, Yuan Longping and his beloved wife Deng Zhe searched in the rice fields of Anjiang Agricultural School, like looking for a needle in a haystack, and successively inspected more than 140,000 flowering rice ears. The General Secretary found 6 male sterile plants. When they matured, they harvested the seeds of the first generation of male sterile plants. From then on, he also tied his own fate to the fate of food. Together.

In the days that followed, he regarded rice as his biological son. The first thing he did after eating every day was to inspect the rice fields. Every time he was about to leave, he was reluctant to leave. Leave.

Two years later, May 19, was the low point of Yuan Longping's rice research. Seeing that his experiment was about to achieve certain results, a natural and man-made disaster brought an unprecedented blow to Yuan Longping.

Yuan Longping, who was thinking about the experimental field every day, hurriedly rode his bicycle straight to the experimental field after breakfast. But when he arrived, a terrible scene happened:

It turned out that, A sudden storm last night destroyed Yuan Longping's experimental field. In fact, it was not that simple. Four days later, Yuan Longping found several seedlings in a well. This also confirmed that someone was deliberately destroying his experimental field. This is The "May 18th" grain destruction case shocked Qianyang area.

Seeing this scene, this formerly strong man could no longer control his emotions. Tears filled his eyes, and his heart was bleeding at the moment. Because of this, his man who did not cultivate but cultivated I don’t know how many more years the plan will be postponed.

He endured his grief and went around looking for the surviving seedlings. He stumbled and walked for a long time, and finally found five experimental seedlings half buried in a pool of mud. For him, this was a blessing in misfortune. He regained hope. He carefully picked up the remaining seedlings with both hands, put them in his arms, and took them home.

After returning home, the colleagues who worked with him not only did not sympathize with his experience, but also maliciously slandered him, saying that he gave away his seedlings because he was afraid that his experiment would not be successful. Pulled out.

Even so, Yuan Longping has not lost confidence. He may be born with a genetic gene that resists frustration and defeat, and he will not give up easily what he thinks is right.

In order to speed up his breeding experiments, he took his team to the Hainan area. Hainan has unique climate and terrain conditions, so it is known as the "breeders' paradise."

At the same time, the harsh living environment of this place cannot be ignored. Most areas are still thatched houses. No matter day or night, the sky is as hot as a dome, and there are swarms of mosquitoes biting Yuan Longping and others. He was covered in bruises and was complaining incessantly.

There is a jingle in Hainan Island:

In order to prevent mosquito bites, Yuan Longping sometimes had to wrap his whole body tightly with a film covering the seedlings, but in that extremely hot environment, it was difficult to In addition, the film was airtight, and Yuan Longping was covered in heat sores several times.

This is not the most serious one. The most serious one was the 7.2-magnitude earthquake that occurred in Ashan County, Yunnan Province in 1970. Yuan Longping’s Yuanjiang County was also affected by the earthquake. When the earthquake first occurred, Yuan Longping was the first to think of The first thing he wanted was not to evacuate immediately to save his life, but to grab the seeds quickly, because these seeds were everything to him.

Although the ground in this place was still shaking and aftershocks occurred frequently, Yuan Longping did not leave this place because the rice had just sprouted at that time. Choosing to evacuate at this time would mean giving up, so the efforts made before All in vain.

Failed to enter production.

Despite this, Yuan Longping also felt the seriousness of the situation, and his sense of urgency became even stronger. He was determined to seize the commanding heights of the world in the field of hybrid rice, surpass Japan and the United States, and win glory for his motherland. .

So he began to race against time to find wild rice. In the end, his persistence paid off. On November 23, 1970, two of Yuan Longping's apprentices discovered a wild male plant in a swamp. The news of the sterile strain made Yuan Longping, who was far away in Beijing at the time, rush back to Yunnan by train overnight.

Since then, Yuan Longping led his apprentices to conduct thousands of experiments in Yunnan, experiencing failures and successes. Finally, the emperor paid off. In 1974, Yuan Longping relied on his Inspiration finally successfully cultivated the powerful combination "Nanyou No. 2" and successfully tested it that year.

You must know that at that time, the average yield of rice seeds per mu could only reach about 200 kilograms, but the yield of Nanyou No. 2 rice seeds transformed by Yuan Longping could reach an average of more than 500 kilograms per mu.

But just as he was enjoying the harvest, new problems arose. The seed production yield was low, with less than six kilograms of seed produced per mu. Yuan Longping was frustrated again. People around him ridiculed that many outside scientists began to pour cold water on Yuan Longping's experimental results.

Life itself is a carrier of pressure. If we turn the ups and downs on the way forward into motivation, we will move towards success and glory. Yuan Longping is in this kind of situation Driven by pressure, he successfully cracked the secret of low seed production and increased the yield per mu of seed production from 5.5 kilograms to 50 kilograms, and even reached 100 kilograms.

After successfully solving the problem, Yuan Longping and his assistants used their scientific practice and hard work to unveil the large-scale promotion of hybrid rice in my country. In 1976, my country began to promote hybrid rice. By 1998, nearly Half of the rice fields are covered with new varieties developed by Yuan Longping’s team.

Therefore, he is also known as the father of hybrid rice in the world, and his hybrid rice is also called "Oriental Magic Rice".

But he did not stop there. He was not satisfied with his current achievements, because his dream of enjoying the shade under the grass when he was a child had not yet been realized, and his dream of covering the world with hybrid rice had not yet been realized.

It was this "greedy heart" that could never be satisfied that made Yuan Longping never stop. He went from studying paddy fields to deserts, then to saline-alkali lands, and then to It is to carry out research on sea rice, and at the same time it has gone abroad, so that thousands of people can now eat and have enough to eat.

In the past, he cultivated seeds. When encountering severe cold weather, he could only tie the seeds to his body and use his body temperature to germinate the rice. Years of artificial germination work caused Yuan Longping's lumbar vertebrae to appear. question, but he still persisted.

Thanks to his persistence, he has solved the food and clothing problems of many people in the world. Although many people in the world have never met Yuan Longping, they all call him affectionately. Yuan Longping is: father.

He was busy working in the fields day after day, and therefore missed his mother's death. At the same time, he also missed the time he spent with his wife and children. Very few.

Yuan Longping can truly be called an unparalleled scholar in the country. In today's materialistic society, he lives in a corner with the heart of a gentleman and is indifferent to his ambitions.

There was once a documentary that filmed the room where Yuan Longping lived. In his room, most of Chen Liang’s furniture was old furniture from decades ago, and most of the clothes he wore were from street vendors. I bought it online for only a few dozen yuan.

Yuan Longping likes to be obsessed with his rice business and has nothing to focus on other than work. For him, the lighted stage will only make him look more cramped. He does not like to shine on the world stage. Above all, I like to be the person who works silently behind the scenes.

For such a person who is indifferent to fame and wealth, there are still some misleading rumors about him on the Internet. A few years ago, Mr. Yuan was bullied online for buying a mobile phone. There are also rumors that he is worth hundreds of billions and is the richest man in Hunan, etc. Those who say these words, have you touched your conscience? It is really chilling.

In today's world, there are not many people like Mr. Yuan who are indifferent to fame and wealth. He is an example for us to learn from. He uses his actions to teach us how to be a truly upright Chinese, and we We should also inherit Mr. Yuan’s last wish and devote ourselves to the great cause of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.

The most important thing we should do now is not to waste a grain of food.

Pay tribute to Mr. Yuan! I wish Mr. Yuan a happy journey!