To be the first it takes passion and tenacity

In this series, professionals discuss their experiences accomplishing something for the first time. Read their stories here, then write your own using #IWasTheFirst in the body of the post. 

What’s it take to be the first to accomplish something?

Most people probably would say that it takes “originality or genius.” It might surprise you that as a scientist I would say these are “really-nice-to-haves,” but they are generally overrated!

Tenacity, on the other hand – now you’re talking indispensable!

In my case, my colleagues and I at Monsanto created the first genetically engineered plants. We succeeded in transferring a bacterial gene into petunia plants that gave petunias a new trait, or characteristic. Fourteen long years later, this work led our company to introduce the first commercial, genetically modified soybean and cotton seeds that have since changed farming around the world.

This work was exciting – thrilling, to be really honest – and of course I won’t say that it lacked in originality. Genius? Well maybe of few of my best friends and family were amazed that a farm kid from central Illinois could even be a part of something like this.

Personally, I credit growing up on farm, being exposed to my dad’s strong work ethic on it, seeing the challenges farmers face everyday like drought or weeds or bugs, as well as their ability to start all over again the next spring with renewed optimism – as the source of my tenacity. And I believe the same is true of most people who do unprecedented things.

When my colleagues and I started our research at Monsanto, you could clearly sense the skepticism. After all, we were, at the time, a big industrial chemicals company! The research my colleagues and I were doing on the biology of genes and petunia plants could hardly have struck our peers as being more weird. 

But our boss, Dr. Ernie Jaworski, believed in our project and was tenacious in protecting it from critics and cost-cutters. I drove the science hard. My fellow colleague, Steve Rogers, said I was one of “most driven” men he ever interacted with. And because of this, our team, not only transformed petunias, but Monsanto itself. Dr. Jaworski was rewarded with the 1998 Medal of Technology, awarded by the President of the United States, but he deserves wider recognition.

Perhaps my friend and mentor, Dr. Norman Borlaug, illustrates an even better example of the importance of tenacity…and someone who deserves even wider recognition!

Known today, within agricultural circles, as “The Man Who Saved a Billion Lives” and “The Father of the Green Revolution,” Dr. Borlaug saved Mexico and then Pakistan and India from mass starvation. But the story of how he developed and introduced the new wheat strains that accomplished these feats is grossly under-appreciated. 

In 1944, Dr. Borlaug was a young microbiologist working at DuPont and living in Wilmington, Delaware. He had a pregnant wife and a 14-month old daughter. For the first time in his life, he was making a decent living.

Then the Rockefeller Foundation offered him a job with a joint program it was establishing with the Mexican government to boost food production. It was an offer most people would have never even considered. The “opportunity” was to make less money while working in the hot sun in a foreign country. 

But Borlaug had known hunger himself during the Depression; addressing it on a mass scale appealed to his deepest ambitions. So with the encouragement of his remarkable wife, he chose to “go with his passion,” as we’d say today – the passion that fueled his tenacity.

Soon he needed all of it. He found his project understaffed and underequipped. Then his proposal to accelerate his breeding experiments by growing wheat in two different parts of the country, with two different climates, got rejected. “Shuttle breeding” couldn’t work, his boss said; conventional agronomic wisdom said so.

Borlaug quit.

Was that an example of unshakeable self-confidence? Strength of character? Pigheadedness? Perhaps the answer in a case like this depends on how things eventually pan out.

To fast forward, Borlaug’s boss’s boss intervened on his side. And within a few short years, Borlaug had developed a new strain of wheat that was resistant to “rust,” a fungal disease; was suitable for machine harvesting; could benefit from fertilizer without tipping over...and had much higher yields!

In short, he had developed the wheat that would drive The Green Revolution. By 1963 Mexico’s wheat harvest was six times what it had been in the year he had arrived in the country.

By the mid-1960s, however, an even greater hunger crisis loomed in India and Pakistan. I can still vividly remember as a 12-year-old kid seeing the images on the Sunday morning news shows of starving people on the other side of the world. So did Borlaug and he began trying to get his new wheat seeds planted on the subcontinent, only to immediately face obstacles:

• The first shipment of seeds, in 1965, got held up in Mexican customs, so it couldn’t be sent in time from the designated port.
• Loaded instead onto a 30-truck convoy, the shipment was bound for the port in Los Angeles when the Watts riots broke out there, prompting a shutdown of the freeway.
• Reaching the port at last, the shipment got stalled again. A Mexican bank rejected Pakistan’s check payment because of three misspelled words.
• The seeds finally made it onto a freighter bound for the subcontinent, but got stalled again, because … war broke out between India and Pakistan.
• Meanwhile, all of the above provided time for rumors to spread in India and Pakistan that if farmers planted these foreign Mexican wheat seeds--their soils and their children would be sterilized!

Through it all, Borlaug was tenacious, as always. By 1970, wheat production in India had increased by an amazing 63 percent and in Pakistan it had nearly doubled. The widely anticipated famine had been averted. That same year, Borlaug, the erstwhile microbiologist, won the Nobel Peace Prize and his work continued as he focused on giving farmers more tools in the fight against hunger until he died, in 2009.

The tenacity instilled within me and fueled by my dad, Dr. Jaworski and Dr. Borlaug still drives me to this day. I don’t want to see the biotechnology tools that I helped invent limited because of misunderstandings about what they are and what they do. This is why I am so tenacious in reaching out to as many people and audiences through constructive dialogue. It’s critical to ensuring that future generations can benefit from science and live in a more food secure world for years to come.