

Billions Served: Norman Borlaug interview (2000) - glymor
http://www.reason.com/news/show/27665.html

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Tangurena
Some of the claims in that article are pretty bogus: _Who has saved more human
lives than anyone else in history?_

I'd put 2 other names ahead of his:

Stanislov Petrov - who didn't intentionally decide to _not_ start WW3, he just
decided that if it were going to happen, the Americans would have started it
differently. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov>

Fritz Haber - Looking to make money, he came up with a way to make fertilizer
from the nitrogen in the air. This is now the process that underlies about
half of the agricultural fertilizer production. If this hadn't been invented,
the upper limit of human population would be a lot lower than it is now - we'd
have got to about 3 billion people before we reached the point where we
couldn't feed any more people.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process>

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vijayr
_most people have put themselves on intellectual autopilot. Most don’t study
on their own initiative, but only when they are forced to do so. Even when
they study, they choose to study the obvious and conventional subjects_

 _For them, education was about the doors they believed would open because of
how they were labeled by institutions, not about making themselves truly
better as thinkers_

:-(

~~~
bbgm
I believe the fault here, at least in most third world countries, lies with
society and associated expectations. My grandmother never approved of my
decision not to become an engineer, but go into the hard sciences instead. The
quality of education I got there was never a problem (and in fact was really
good) and the institutions had a lot to do with that quality.

I know of any number of people who kept trying to become an engineer or a
doctor (at least in those days), or chose science in high school cause that's
what they were "supposed to do"

~~~
vijayr
sadly, we don't learn something because we like it, or we want to learn it. we
learn something (anything) because we think 1. it'll increase our job
prospects 2. it'll increase our "status" in "society" and 3. it'll help us
earn money.

