Norman Borlaug

In How To Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates holds up Borlaug as the figure the Malthusian doomsayers failed to anticipate — “the brilliant plant scientist who sparked a revolution in agriculture that led to the gains in India and elsewhere.” Per Gates, Borlaug did it by developing varieties of wheat with bigger grains and other characteristics that raised the yield (more food per acre of land), making him the answer to why Ehrlich and other doomsayers were wrong: “they didn’t factor in the power of innovation.”

Gates calls him “one of the great unsung heroes of history,” pairing him with the Haber-Bosch process as the most important advances most people have never heard of. He functions in the book as the archetype of human ingenuity defeating a predicted catastrophe — the same template Gates wants applied to the climate problem.

Context: Norman Borlaug (1914–2009) was an American agronomist whose high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties drove the Green Revolution. He won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize and is widely credited with saving hundreds of millions of people from famine.

Where this appears

• How To Avoid a Climate Disaster — cited as the unsung hero of the Green Revolution and the proof that innovation, not doom, wins; paired with Haber-Bosch as an underappreciated breakthrough.