Yuan Longping

Developed hybrid rice by using male sterility to produce hybrid seed in a self-pollinating crop, against the view that rice shows no significant hybrid vigour; with colleagues, including his assistant Li Bihu who found the key wild male-sterile plant, he brought hybrids to wide use in China by 1976 at yields 20-30 percent higher.

Led China's national cooperative research on hybrid rice and later proposed and led the two-line and super-hybrid rice programmes that extended the technology.

Shared hybrid rice techniques and breeding materials with scientists abroad, with training for some 14,000 people from over 80 countries, and received the 2004 Wolf Prize in Agriculture.

In 1964 he began research on hybrid rice and published 'Male Sterility in Rice', proposing male sterility as the way to use hybrid vigour in a crop where hand emasculation is impractical, despite the prevailing view that rice showed no significant heterosis.

This is consistent with a researcher willing to work against the prevailing view of his field on the strength of his own reasoning. Independent Thinking

In 2012 he set a goal of 15 tonnes of super-hybrid rice per hectare by 2015; critics said the record plots cost far more than a farmer could spend and that the rice resisted disease poorly, while his research centre replied that yield was its assigned focus and the plots were experimental.

This is consistent with a strong drive to push yield records, whose practical value for farmers was disputed. Achievement Drive

At the end of 1970 his assistant Li Bihu found a wild male-sterile rice plant in Hainan that Yuan named 'YeBai'; from it the first male-sterile and maintainer lines were produced in 1972, the restorer line followed in 1973, and hybrid rice was in widespread production by 1976.

This is consistent with a long-running programme reaching practical scale once a key plant was found and a team built the full breeding system. Persistence