<v Speaker 1>I'm Jerry Broadway, and this is Anonymous America, where we

<v Speaker 1>take a deep dive into American history to find a

<v Speaker 1>hero you've never heard of. Over the last one hundred years,

<v Speaker 1>one man is estimated to have saved a billion human lives.

<v Speaker 1>A billion. That's more than any general, doctor or president

<v Speaker 1>who ever lived. But he didn't cure a disease, he

<v Speaker 1>didn't win a war. He grew wheat and he won

<v Speaker 1>the Nobel Prize for it. And when they came to

<v Speaker 1>tell him, he was literally out in the middle of

<v Speaker 1>a wheat field, and he almost didn't believe them. His

<v Speaker 1>name was Norman Borlog. And the reason you've never heard

<v Speaker 1>it is the whole point of the story. From a

<v Speaker 1>Dad Productions, This is Anonymous America. Norman Borlog was born

<v Speaker 1>in nineteen fourteen on a small farm near Crisco, Iowa,

<v Speaker 1>in a tight community of Norwegian immigrants. He grew up

<v Speaker 1>working in the dirt. The Depression nearly kept him out

<v Speaker 1>of college, but he worked his way through the University

<v Speaker 1>of Minnesota and studied plant pathology, the science of the

<v Speaker 1>diseases that can kill crops. In the nineteen forties, he

<v Speaker 1>took a job most scientists would have turned down flat.

<v Speaker 1>A rust choked research station in Mexico, funded by the

<v Speaker 1>Rockefeller Foundation that pointed at a problem that looked hopeless,

<v Speaker 1>a country that could not grow enough wheat to feed

<v Speaker 1>its own people. Wheat had an ancient enemy, a fungus

<v Speaker 1>called stem rust that could erase an entire harvest in

<v Speaker 1>a single season. And there was another problem. The more

<v Speaker 1>you fertilized wheat to make it grow, the taller and

<v Speaker 1>heavier it got, until it toppled over under the weight

<v Speaker 1>of its own grain and rotted in the field. The

<v Speaker 1>experts of the day were writing books predicting mass starvation.

<v Speaker 1>Their math was as simple as it was grim. Too

<v Speaker 1>many people, not enough food, and nothing anyone could do

<v Speaker 1>about it. But Norman refused to believe that. For years,

<v Speaker 1>he did brutally unglamorous work, crossing thousands of wheat plants

<v Speaker 1>by hand, one at a time, hunting for the rare

<v Speaker 1>few that could shrug off the rust. Then he invented

<v Speaker 1>a trick that no one thought would work. He grew

<v Speaker 1>two generations of wheat every year by shuttling his seed

<v Speaker 1>between two stations in Mexico, one in the cool northern

<v Speaker 1>highlands and one in the warm South. Planting at opposite seasons,

<v Speaker 1>it doubled his speed, and almost by accident, it produced

<v Speaker 1>wheat hardy enough to grow just about anywhere. Finally, Norman

<v Speaker 1>crossed his rustproof strains with a short, stocky dwarf wheat

<v Speaker 1>from Japan. The result was a plant with a thick,

<v Speaker 1>stubby stalk, strong enough to hold up an enormous head

<v Speaker 1>of grain without ever falling over. Now you could pour

<v Speaker 1>on fertilizer and water, and instead of toppling, the plant

<v Speaker 1>simply made more wheat. Wheat yields didn't just creep upward,

<v Speaker 1>they exploded, and Mexico, which up until that point had

<v Speaker 1>been importing half its wheat, suddenly had so much they

<v Speaker 1>were able to begin exporting. And then came the real test.

<v Speaker 1>In the mid nineteen sixties, India and Pakistan were staring

<v Speaker 1>down a famine that experts were certain would kill millions.

<v Speaker 1>Borlock shipped his seed halfway around the world, right through

<v Speaker 1>a war between those two countries, through mountains of doubt

<v Speaker 1>and bureaucracy, through a convoy that was held up at

<v Speaker 1>a border crossing, and the harvest that followed were the

<v Speaker 1>largest those nations had ever seen. So large. They ran

<v Speaker 1>out of places to store the grain, so large that

<v Speaker 1>in some towns they closed the schools and used the

<v Speaker 1>school buildings as granaries. And that famine that everyone had predicted, well,

<v Speaker 1>it simply never happened. They called it the Green Revolution,

<v Speaker 1>and in nineteen seventy they gave Norman Borlog the Nobel Prize,

<v Speaker 1>not for medicine or for chemistry, but for peace, because

<v Speaker 1>a world that can feed itself is a world with

<v Speaker 1>one less reason to go to war. The story goes

<v Speaker 1>that the news reached his wife first back home, and

<v Speaker 1>she had to drive out to the fields to find

<v Speaker 1>him to tell him that he'd won. He didn't believe her.

<v Speaker 1>Then he told her, well, that's fine, but I still

<v Speaker 1>have a day's work in front of me, and he

<v Speaker 1>went right ahead and finished it. Norman kept working well

<v Speaker 1>into his nineties, carrying his methods to Africa, arguing with

<v Speaker 1>anyone who would listen that no human being should ever

<v Speaker 1>have to go hungry. He collected the Nobel Prize, the

<v Speaker 1>Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal, one

<v Speaker 1>of only a handful of Americans to ever hold all three.

<v Speaker 1>And still you walk down any street in this country

<v Speaker 1>and ask one hundred people who Norman Borlog was, and

<v Speaker 1>you'll be lucky if you can find one that can

<v Speaker 1>tell you that number a billion lives is only an estimate.

<v Speaker 1>Maybe it's too high, maybe it's too low, but the

<v Speaker 1>direction of it is not in doubt. There is a

<v Speaker 1>real case to be made that this quiet man from

<v Speaker 1>Iowa is responsible for more people being alive right now

<v Speaker 1>than anyone else who ever walked the earth. He never

<v Speaker 1>wanted recognition, He never wanted a statue, he never wanted

<v Speaker 1>a street named after him. He just wanted the harvest

<v Speaker 1>to come in. That's Norman Borlog, and that's anonymous America.