The 20th century saw the Green Revolution which led to significant increases in crop yields. The revolution introduced new technologies such as high-yielding varieties of cereals, and the widespread use of chemical fertilizers (to produce their high yields, the new seeds required far more fertilizer than traditional varieties), pesticides, and controlled irrigation[1].
Norman Borlaug is regarded as the father of the Green Revolution. He is credited with saving billions of lives from starvation, and he received a Nobel Peace Prize. Food insecurity and starvation are real problems today, but they used to be much worse.
If you were to list people who have saved hundreds of millions of lives, in addition to Norman Borlaug, you would get individuals such as the ones below:
| Maurice Hilleman | Develop 8 vaccines including measles, mumps, hepatitis, and meningitis |
| Edward Jenner | Developed the smallpox vaccine and is the father of immunology |
| Jonas Salk | Developed the polio vaccine |
| Alan Turing | Cracked the Enigma code in WWII |
| Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bezpalov, and Boris Baranov | Went into the reactor at Chernobyl and put out the fire before the reactor could explode and lay waste to Europe |
| Joseph Lister | Father of modern antiseptic technique which dramatically reduced deaths to infection |
How do you express gratitude to individuals who saved that many lives?
There are three Russians – Stanislav Petrov, Vasili Arkhipov and Boris Yeltsin – who saved lives because of what they did not do. For example:
[1] One consequence of the Green Revolution is the extensive use of pesticides which obviously created other problems.
[1] He was a graduate of the University of Minnesota (where I went to graduate school). One of many amazing people who were educated in the Twin Cities.
On September 26, 1983, he was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile was launched from the United States. Petrov judged the report to be a false alarm, and his decision is credited with having prevented an incorrect retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in large-scale nuclear war. Investigation later confirmed that the satellite warning system had indeed malfunctioned.
The other two Russian gentlemen also did not initiate a nuclear conflict even though alarms were incorrectly going off that indicated that Russia was under attack. You realize how close we came, more than once, to nuclear war.