The Greatest Living American

I'm ashamed to admit I've never heard this story before, by Gregg Easterbrook:

Born 1914 in Cresco, Iowa, Borlaug has saved more lives than anyone
else who has ever lived. A plant breeder, in the 1940s he moved to Mexico to
study how to adopt high-yield crops to feed impoverished nations. Through the
1940s and 1950s, Borlaug developed high-yield wheat strains, then patiently
taught the new science of Green Revolution agriculture to poor farmers of Mexico
and nations to its south. When famine struck India and Pakistan in the
mid-1960s, Borlaug and a team of Mexican assistants raced to the Subcontinent
and, often working within sight of artillery flashes from the Indo-Pakistani War
of 1965, sowed the first high-yield cereal crop in that region; in a decade,
India's food production increased sevenfold, saving the Subcontinent from
predicted Malthusian catastrophes. Borlaug moved on to working in South
America.

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