9. WILLINGNESS TO TAKE CHANCES – The Willingness to Take Chances of Norman Borlaug
First, he and his two assistants traveled from village to village and gathered thousands of heads of wheat, each containing sev- eral seeds. They tried to find heads that appeared different from one another, hoping for different varieties, wanting as much diver- sity as possible. By the time they were done, they had 110,000 seeds collected.. It was this giant batch of seeds that Norman and his assistants were planting by hand in the hills outside of Mexico City. They planned to plant all of the seeds and, day by day, watch them grow. If any plant showed signs of stem rust, Norman would yank it out, root and all. He was taking the chances that of the thousands of varieties, at least one would be disease-resistant. For the rest of spring and into the summer, Norman and his assistants woke daily before dawn and spent the entire day crawling through the rows of wheat, looking closely at each plant, and pulling out any that were diseased. By late summer, all that remained of the 110,000 plants were four types that were not afflicted by stem rust.
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