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Service to Humanity
Published August 16, 2022
In 1944, a series of diseases and poor soil halted Mexico’s wheat production. Farmers were in shambles from low wheat yields, and low to middle-class citizens found it increasingly difficult to pay for food. Mexico was relying heavily on its importation of wheat from several other countries, but along with the mass importing of wheat, many of its citizens were nearing the point of starvation.
All of this changed, fortunately, with the help of a plant pathologist named Dr. Norman Borlaug.
The Mexican Ministry of Agriculture offered Borlaug a research position to resolve Mexico’s devastating wheat yields, which he gladly accepted. For the next 16 years, Borlaug and his team would develop varieties of disease-resistant wheat in the hopes of boosting wheat production and keeping the most impoverished citizens from starvation.
The years Borlaug dedicated to this research program were nothing short of challenging. Knowing the magnitude of the situation, the urgency of the program, he proposed to hasten the research, doubling the funds the team had already declared so limited. At times he felt the earth crack into two between himself and his colleagues; they opposed his plans with how to move forward with the research. Although completely necessary, his colleagues saw his plans as outrageous, and were so opposed to his methods that Borlaug thought it best to resign. But due to the significance of the research, its potential to save the most vulnerable citizens of Mexico, he stayed and continued his work.
After 10 agonizing years of breeding wheat varieties, Borlaug and his team successfully developed high-yield, disease-resistant, semi-dwarf wheat.
By 1963, the majority of Mexico’s agricultural lands adopted Borlaug’s wheat varieties. Harvest yields were 6 times the amount before his arrival, and Mexico was now a self-sufficient nation for wheat.
Mexico’s success with its wheat production was just the beginning for Borlaug. He believed his wheat varieties could save countless lives from famine elsewhere.
In the 1960s, India found itself amid war, contributing to the start of a disastrous famine. With support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government, Borlaug could continue his work in India, bringing with him over 500 tons of disease-resistant wheat seeds for Indian and Pakistani farmers.
Due to Borlaug’s crops, India’s wheat yields were the highest ever recorded in 1967. Alongside India’s success, Pakistan and Turkey adopted the wheat varieties into their agriculture with similar results. Since India’s first adoption of Borlaug’s crops, the rate of its food production continues to surpass the rate of its population growth. His crops have also made considerable progress in the well-being of people in 6 other Latin American countries, 6 countries in the Near and Middle East, and several other countries in Africa.
Today he is considered the scientist who saved a billion lives from starvation.
What drove him to do this? I could say, he was simply doing his job. Or: he wanted the recognition he rightfully deserved. Or: it seemed like the right thing to do.
Or: there was no reason; only his nature.
How science progresses
Borlaug’s wheat varieties represent one of the few instances that marked scientific progress, a point in history where humanity moves onward, for the better. Matching the significance of inventing the light bulb, developing synthetic fertilizer, inventing the gene-editing tool CRISPR, walking the moon.
How does this all happen? What gives us this desire to keep moving forward?
Science does not progress on its own; it progresses just as much as we want it to. From discovering the existence of phenomena previously unknown, developing concepts to explain the inexplicable, to stimulating research outside the intended field, scientific progress is an unabating orb of light piercing all directions we cannot predict.
Thomas Kuhn, a philosopher of science, wrote that scientific revolutions—breakthroughs lending us significant practical usage—transpire after scientists discover anomalies: deviations from theoretical expectations and established laws. These anomalies can only be resolved or explained by altering the laws we’ve believed to be fundamental, unequivocal, irrefutable. Some of the most notable instances of these scientific revolutions are from the achievements of Copernicus, Galileo, Lavoisier, Darwin, Einstein, Watson and Crick.
Vastly different from Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific progress is one from John Desmond Bernal, renowned philosopher and biophysicist; he believed science progresses once discoveries are practically harnessed to satiate humanity’s social and economic needs.
Most confounding of these theories comes from the philosopher of science David Hull, proposing that scientific progress inadvertently models Darwin’s account of evolution. Much like the process of variation and selection, Hull argued that scientific concepts evolve from a communal selection of the diverse work of all scientists. Just as genetic mutations can be completely arbitrary, scientists will contribute new, unpredictable ideas based on their research findings. Similar to the environmental stressors that determine which genetic variations are favored, the current economic state and corporate goals influence which scientific works are the most relevant to include in further research.
Oftentimes the countless research papers published each year can be overwhelming to scientists. Acknowledging the difficulty in considering all research previously undertaken that relates to their focus, scientists tend to develop their own parameters, to shape the environment themselves as they select the scientific works that best align with their goals or the goals of the agency they work for, while leaving the majority of scientific work to go unnoticed.
Browsing through the library of scientific achievement, the trend is all too recognizable: scientists, no matter the reason, strive for the development of technologies that will improve human well-being.
Advancing humanity
The desire to improve human well-being is a trait everyone has. Whether this trait is acquired or inherited is a topic of ongoing debate. Our nature can be impulsive to disregard self-interest, taking the form of compassion, empathy, sympathy. In more extreme accounts: humanitarianism and altruism.
Humanitarianism
Humanitarianism is a belief in the value of human life. The goals of humanitarians are to reduce the suffering of others and improve the conditions of humanity. Believing every person has a duty to promote human welfare.
The system of beliefs finds itself scattered among recorded history, an ideology so influential as to embody the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies—an organization formed in 1919, providing emergency assistance and disaster relief to the most vulnerable worldwide.
Some have proposed humanitarian beliefs are but a perceptible form of human instincts. 18th-century philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau believed humankind is selfless by nature. Opposed to the contemporaries of his time, his theories shared that self-interest and concern for others were not exclusive to each other, which today is supported by neurologists and biologists alike.
Another philosopher by the name of Thomas Hobbes believed there was universal selfishness in humans. Displays of empathy, compassion, and altruism were in reality manifestations of the actor’s best interests.
Echoing the beliefs of Thomas Hobbes, the renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins professed, “We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” Supporting his theories is a concept known as kin selection: an evolutionary strategy that favors the reproductive success of an organism’s relatives, especially at the cost of that organism’s life. A better word: altruism. However, as much as I’d like to agree with Dawkins’s claims, I wonder how altruistic behavior can be exhibited so impulsively for others outside of another’s bloodline.
All too often it happens.
Altruism
Why do we care about our future generations? Not just the people we will meet, but the people to replace us so much as a hundred years from now? I would assume that the answer lies somewhere amid the most complex system we have yet to understand in its entirety: the human brain.
Engaging in altruistic behavior allows one to reap physical and psychological benefits abound, as well as increase their own well-being. Whether altruism derives from self-interest alone or concern for the well-being of others is a timeless question with multiple points of research supporting one or the other.
Nearly every decision we make activates multiple regions of the brain, complicating the search for what underlies a specific action. In particular, the structures involved in altruistic decision-making include regions within the mentalizing network, reward system, and emotional salience network.
In 2006, a team of neuroscience researchers, supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health, conducted a study to investigate the neural mechanisms of charitable donations using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants in the study were given the option to allocate their funds to certain causes or withhold funds to unfavorable ones. Based on the participants’ decisions and subsequent fMRI scans, not only are the regions of the reward system activated, but separate regions involved with emotional processing as well, suggesting that reward and concern for others are dual motivators for altruistic behavior.
In 2015, another team of researchers at the Medical Research Council, Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK conducted a study to explore the willpower of an individual as they witness another in distress. Participants were given a sum of money and tasked to witness another individual receiving an electric shock. Having the opportunity to reduce the intensity of the shock depending on the amount of money they were willing to give up, magnetic resonance imaging stood to monitor their brain activity during their decision-making. Based on the results of the study, participants willing to give up the most money exhibited increased responses in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The researchers concluded their findings to support the notion that individuals who exhibit altruistic behavior do so out of empathic concern despite reducing their own distress that had developed from witnessing those in pain.
Even in the realm of scientific research, we spend countless hours racing to advance science for the future of humankind, to ease their lives and comfort our own with that superlative feeling of achievement.
Our Madness
From what I can tell you, there is no equation, no concept that can predict the trends of scientific progress. The most reliable of predictions being that technological advancements continue to proceed, unlikely to halt.
Certainly, though: humanity will keep moving forward in unprecedented fields from branches of science we once thought to thoroughly understand. We will keep discovering new phenomena, developing new concepts, rewriting outdated theories. The ceiling of scientific invention is a runaway pet we will never seem to catch, as much as the universe running rampant and onward. But at this time, it is our senseless nature to make sense out of this senseless world.
“The desire that guides me in all I do is the desire to harness the forces of nature to the service of humankind.”
—Nikola Tesla