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Billions Served: Norman Borlaug interview (2000)

10 pointsby glymorover 15 years ago

2 comments

Tangurenaover 15 years ago
Some of the claims in that article are pretty bogus: <i>Who has saved more human lives than anyone else in history?</i><p>I'd put 2 other names ahead of his:<p>Stanislov Petrov - who didn't intentionally decide to <i>not</i> start WW3, he just decided that if it were going to happen, the Americans would have started it differently. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov</a><p>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.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber</a><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process</a>
vijayrover 15 years ago
<i>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</i><p><i>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</i><p>:-(
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