In 1944, Norman Borlaug left a stable research job at DuPont to take a post in Mexico that paid less and came with no laboratory.
The country's wheat crop was collapsing under a fungus called stem rust. Farmers were losing entire fields, season after season.
Borlaug worked the fields himself, on his knees in the dirt outside Ciudad Obregón, crossing thousands of wheat varieties by hand. He was looking for one that could resist the fungus without collapsing under the weight of its own grain.
For years, nothing worked. The stalks that resisted rust grew too tall and fell over in wind and rain, and the harvest was lost anyway.
Dear Reader,
I believe Elon Musk is out for revenge…
And it could help make a lot of people rich.
You see, he co-founded OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, as a non-profit.
But later he was pushed out of the company…
And the other co-founders turned it into a for-profit business.
Elon even sued them in federal court…
But the case was dismissed on a technicality.
And here’s where his revenge comes in…
Elon Musk is now backing this hot new AI startup that could drive OpenAI out of business.
The Wall Street Journal calls it…
“The front-runner in the race for artificial-intelligence supremacy”
And now that Elon Musk is backing this startup…
I believe business is about to boom.
And I’ll also show you how to claim a stake for as little as $50.
Even though this has nothing to do with robots, self-driving cars, or rockets…
Its CEO is projecting growth of 8,000% for this year…
Enough to turn $1,000 into $80,000.
We have so much to look forward to.
Borlaug crossed the rust-resistant strains with dwarf varieties from Japan, aiming for a plant short enough to hold up its own grain. It took more than a decade of failed generations before the combination held.
By the late 1950s, Mexico's wheat production had grown enough that the country stopped importing grain and started exporting it.
Elsewhere, the warnings were growing louder. In 1968, biologist Paul Ehrlich published a bestselling book predicting that hundreds of millions of people would starve in the 1970s no matter what was attempted.
India and Pakistan were named among the places considered furthest gone. Some economists in Washington had already written them off as unable to feed themselves in time.
Borlaug shipped his high-yield seed to South Asia and trained local agronomists to plant it. Government bureaucracies in both countries resisted the change and slowed the shipments.
He pushed the seed through anyway. Convoys carrying it crossed into Pakistan and India in the autumn of 1965, in the same season the two countries went to war with each other.
Wheat yields in both nations rose sharply within a few growing seasons. Pakistan reached self-sufficiency in wheat by 1968.
India followed within a few years of that. The famine Ehrlich had described as unavoidable did not arrive.
In 1970, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the work. The Norwegian Nobel Committee credited his wheat with helping turn back famine across two nations.
He was not a household name in either country he had helped feed. He kept working small research plots into his eighties, largely outside public view.
In 1997, journalist Gregg Easterbrook, writing in The Atlantic, estimated that Borlaug's wheat had saved as many as a billion lives from starvation. No president, general, or businessman of the twentieth century approaches that number.
Borlaug never ran a company. He never built a fortune.
What he built was a stalk of wheat that stood up straight and fed people who never learned his name.
Most men measure what they will leave behind in dollars or property. Borlaug left a shorter stalk of grain that outlived him by generations and is still feeding people who have no idea where it came from.
What would you build that mattered more than whether anyone remembered you built it?