fern roots, or even white clay at the very extreme." He remembered the sight of those who had starved to death all his life. Yuan considered applying the inheritance rules onto sweet potatoes and wheat since their fast rate of growth made them the practical solutions for the famine. However, he realized that in Southern China sweet potato was never a part of the daily diet and wheat didn't grow well in that area. Therefore, he turned his mind to rice. Heterosis Back in 1906, geneticist George Harrison Shull experimented with hybrid maize. He observed that inbreeding reduced vigor and yield among the offspring but crossbreeding did the opposite. Those experiments proved the concept of heterosis. In the 1950s, geneticist J. C. Stephens and a few others hybridized two sorghum varieties found in Africa to create high-yielding offspring. Those results were inspiring for Yuan. However, maize and sorghum reproduce mainly through cross-pollination, while rice is a self-pollinating plant, which would make any crossbreeding attempts difficult, for obvious reasons. In Edmund Ware Sinnott's book Principles of Genetics, it clearly states that self-pollinating plants, like wheat and rice, have experienced long-term selection both by nature and by humans. Therefore, traits that were inferior were all excluded, and the remaining traits were all superior. He speculated that there would be no advantage in crossbreeding rice, and that the nature of self-pollination makes it hard to do cross breed experiments on rice on a large scale. Contributions Yuan was both professionally and personally interested on rice production. He spent a majority of his time in the field, rather than staying confined in a lab or publishing papers. As such, he played a large role in Chinese agriculture by mentoring and leading others in the field, which helped foster future achievements in Chinese agriculture. In 1979, his technique for hybrid rice was introduced into the United States, making it the first case of intellectual property rights transfer in the history of the People's Republic of China. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization 1991 statistics show that 20 percent of the world's rice output came from 10 percent of the world's rice fields that grow hybrid rice. Yuan advocated for sharing the success of his breakthroughs with other nations. He and his team donated crucial rice strains to the International Rice Research Institute in 1980. These donated strains were used to create hybrid rice strains