Posted on 03/26/2014 12:07:46 AM PDT by barmag25
WASHINGTON — The father of the so-called Green Revolution has a permanent home in the U.S. Capitol.
Lawmakers unveiled a statue of Norman Borlaug on Tuesday in a ceremony on what would have been his 100th birthday. The Iowa native and University of Minnesota graduate is credited with saving as many as 1 billion people from hunger by creating a type of wheat that was disease resistant and high-yielding.
Borlaug, who died in 2009, won the 1970 Nobel Prize for his work and has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. His likeness will join a group of sculptures that line Statuary Hall in the Capitol, a selection that is limited to only two per state.
"It will be awfully nice to have a miracle worker around here," House Speaker John Boehner joked at Tuesday's ceremony.
Borlaug's statue was created by Benjamin Victor, 35, of South Dakota. His bronze work features Borlaug wearing a hat and a short-sleeved shirt scribbling into a notebook. He has a stoic look on his face and wheat behind him.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesfreepress.com ...
Green = agriculture, not environmentalism.
“creating a type of wheat that was disease resistant and high-yielding.”
What?? You mean he created AN EVIL GMO GRAIN?
This must be stopped, at once!! Where are all the liberals protesting this?
Or does that only apply to corporations like Monsanto, that don’t spend much on Democrat Political extortion?
He turned India, perpetually on the brink of famine, into a food exporter.
By the way, he was highly skeptical of Anthropogenic Global Warming.
Thank you...very well put.
From Wikipedia:
Of environmental lobbyists he stated, “some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things
Welcome back. :-)
He did more good than a thousand do gooders. He received the National Medal of Science the same day my Dad received the National Medal of Technology.
He probably has saved more lives then any other person in history...
Hey, you, good to see ya posting again!
This man was a hero of the 20th Century. He literally devised ways to feed billions.
I read this in light of Bruce Braley’s comment about Charles Grassley re: farmers vs. lawyers. I’m glad Norman Borlaug never went to law school.
He sounds like he was a stand up guy to me.
see #9 and #12
Everything I have read about the guy sounds like he’s an American hero. No wonder his legacy isn’t celebrated more with our current media and education system.
Glad I stumbled across this article. I learned a lot about this guy I Didn’t know and hope everybody else did to.
>> AN EVIL GMO GRAIN? <<
Yes and no. He did genetic modification the old-fashioned way, by selective breeding and cross-breeding — the sort of operations made famous by previous scientists like Luther Burbank. The advanced techniques of molecular biology, which are used to create many of today’s GMO crops, were not practical back in the days when Borlaug did his most important work.
“The Green Revolution” was a 1950s-1960s attack on world hunger. The problem of course was that big-fist regimes are the cause of all hunger in the modern world.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.