Western Culture Global Presents

The Top 100 Heroes of Western Culture
These individuals have most contributed to replacing ignorance with knowledge, savagery with civilization, disease with health, tyranny with liberty, poverty with abundance, and despair with happiness.



#38: Norman Borlaug (1914- )

Norman Borlaug (1914- ) is an American agronomist and Nobel laureate who is directly responsible for saving more lives than perhaps anyone in history.

Borlaug has lived much of his life in poor nations, teaching the techniques of high-yield agriculture. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, largely for playing an essential role in reversing the food shortages experienced by India and Pakistan in the 1960s.

Borlaug is mainly responsible for the fact that global food production in the past 60 years has grown faster than the human population. This production has prevented mass starvation except in sub-Saharan Africa where Borlaug's life-saving work has been condemned and thwarted by environmentalists.

By saving as many as a billion lives, Borlaug and his scientific agriculture demonstrate that reason is virtually unlimited in its ability to overcome the problems of human survival.



Go to #39: Edward Jenner


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