rice with potential for production of hybrid rice. Subsequent experiments proved his original hypothesis feasible, which proved to be his most important contribution to hybrid rice. Yuan went on to solve more problems over the next decades to achieve higher yielding hybrid rice. This took more than a decade. The first experimental hybrid rice did not show any significant advantage over commonly grown varieties, so Yuan suggested crossbreeding cultivated rice varieties with ones growing wild in the countryside. In 1970, beside a railway line in Hainan, he and his team found a particularly important wild variety. Using this one within a breeding programme resulted in varieties with yields improved by 20 - 30% in the late 1970s. For this achievement, Yuan Longping was dubbed the "Father of Hybrid Rice." At present, as much as 50 percent of China's total number of rice paddies grow Yuan Longping's hybrid rice and these hybrid rice paddies yield 60 percent of the total rice production in China. China's total rice output rose from 56.9 million tons in 1950 to 194.7 million tons in 2017. The annual yield increase is enough to feed 70 million additional people. The "Super Rice" Yuan worked on improving showed a 30 percent higher yield, compared to common rice, with a record yield of 17,055 kilograms per hectare being registered in Yongsheng County in Yunnan Province in 1999. In January 2014, Yuan said in an interview that genetically modified food would be the future direction of food and that he had been working on genetic modification of rice. Early stages of hybrid rice experiments Ideology As recently as the 1950s, two separate theories of heredity were taught in China. One theory was from Gregor Mendel and Thomas Hunt Morgan and was based on the concept of genes and alleles. The other theory was from Soviet Union scientists Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin and Trofim Lysenko which stated that organisms would change over the course of their lives to adapt to environmental changes they experienced and their offspring would then inherit the changes. At the time, the Chinese government's official stance on scientific theories was one of "leaning towards the Soviet side", and any ideology from the Soviet Union was deemed to be the only truth while everything else would be seen as being invalid. Yuan, as an agricultural student at Southwest University, remained skeptical on both theories and started his own experiments