to try and come up with his own conclusions. Yuan was taught and mentored by some biologists who followed the ideas of Gregor Mendel and Thomas Hunt Morgan. These included Guan Xianghuan at Southwest Agricultural College and, later, Bao Wenkui at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing. Both were persecuted. Guan took his own life in the 1960s while Bao was imprisoned. In 1962, Yuan visited Bao to discuss Mendelian genetics, and Bao gave him access to up-to-date foreign scientific literature. In 1966 Yuan himself was named as a counter-revolutionary and there were plans to imprison him. However, a letter of support for Yuan and his work was received based on his publication about male-sterile rice, sent from Nie Rongzhen, director of the National Science and Technology Commission. As a result, Yuan was allowed to continue his research and provided with both research assistants and financial support by the Hunan Provincial Party Committee leader Hua Guofeng and others. Yuan did not join the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution or later. Yuan's first experiments, before he became focused on rice, were on the sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) and watermelons. Following Michurin's theory, he grafted Ipomoea alba (a plant with high photosynthesis rate and high efficiency in starch production) onto sweet potatoes. These plants grew substantially larger tubers than those of plants without I. alba grafts. However, when he planted seeds from these grafted sweet potatoes for a second generation, the tubers were normal sized from seeds of the sweet potato part of the plant, while seeds from the I. alba part did not grow sweet potatoes. He continued with similar grafting experiments on other plants, but none of the plants produced offspring with any mixtures of the beneficial traits grafted into their parents. This was in contradiction to the expectations of Michurin's theory. Yuan concluded, "I had learned some background of Mendel and Morgan's theory, and I knew from journal papers that it was proven by experiments and real agricultural applications, such as seedless watermelon. I desired to read more and learn more, but I can only do it secretly." Famine In 1959 China experienced the Great Chinese Famine. Yuan as an agricultural scientist could do little to greatly help people around him in Hunan province. "There was nothing in the field because hungry people took away all the edible things they can find. They eat grass, seeds,