Short video spoiler history: The beginning of modern warfare

Chapter 68 Hybrid Wheat
"Actually, physics is not so bad. Classical physics mainly studies force, heat, sound, light, electricity, etc. If you know Newton's three laws, the law of universal gravitation, and electromagnetic theory, you have almost mastered classical physics. Although chemistry has the guidance of the periodic table, it is really too difficult to rebuild the modern chemical industry system by yourself."

"There are also living things. After traveling through time, what bacteria and viruses are you talking about? It would be a death wish to destroy their jobs."

During the Hongwu period, Jinling City.

Zhu Yuanzhang calmly recorded everything Tianmu said.

It turns out that the knowledge represented by the periodic table is a branch of chemistry. Zhu Yuanzhang remembered that he first heard this name in the art of "turning stone into gold".

The knowledge about free fall that Galileo talked about obviously falls under the category of physics.

"I've never heard of Newton's three laws of motion and universal gravitation, but electromagnetic theory is about electricity and magnets?" Imperial Censor Liu Ji thought as he read the comments. Although it was just a guess, the conclusion was obvious, especially since the imperial court had now learned how to generate electricity and knew that electricity was generated by the rotation of a copper wire between two magnets.

If people were not really bored, who would have discovered this phenomenon and thus promoted the Second Industrial Revolution.

After Yuan passed away, many scholars who studied agricultural technology lamented that of the "Yuan in the South and Li in the North" who fought for food in the past, only "Li" is left now.

[The "Li" here refers to Academician Li Zhensheng, who is as famous as Yuan Lao. Many people respectfully call him the father of distant hybrid wheat.]

[Wheat and rice are the two main grain crops in my country. Due to differences in climate and environment, rice is mainly grown in the vast southern region, while wheat is mostly grown in the north]

[So these two agricultural scientists, one in the north and one in the south, have work trajectories that are almost parallel lines that do not intersect]

[But their lives are so similar. They were all born in an era of hunger and cold, experienced hard life, and then devoted themselves to improving crops, hoping to let more people have enough food to eat.]

[They used all their energy and life to give themselves and all mankind a beautiful answer]

[Li Zhensheng was born in Shandong in 1931. Before he was born, a great famine occurred in Shandong, and more than one million people starved to death.]

[When he was 11 years old, Shandong suffered a severe drought and the crops failed. Famine occurred again. He witnessed with his own eyes people who were extremely hungry gnawing on tree bark and eating grass.]

[Li Zhensheng's family was also in financial difficulty. His father died early, and his mother had to raise four children alone. They often had no food to eat.]

In front of Wuying Palace.

When Zhu Yuanzhang heard Tianmu mention the issue of food again, he couldn't help but become serious.

It can be seen that people in later generations have put a lot of effort into increasing grain production, including selecting and breeding high-yield crops, wheat and rice nationwide, using fertilizers and crop rotation, and building water conservancy projects. Now there is a new way to increase grain production: distant hybridization of wheat.

The term "distant hybrid wheat" is similar to the "hybrid rice" we heard last time, but one is wheat and the other is rice.

Even Zhu Yuanzhang had to admit that the importance of grain in later generations had reached a "crazy" level. Of course, the "crazy" here includes a lot of admiration.

This is a first-rate benevolent policy.

From the previous scenes, everyone certainly knew the difficult times after the founding of the country. Under such circumstances, Li Zhensheng, who lost his father at a young age, naturally lived a hard life.

This point resonated with the majority of the people in Jinling City, so when they saw Li Zhensheng joining the Agricultural College with the idea of ​​eating for free, they couldn't help but laugh. They would do the same if they were in his shoes. This is a very realistic issue.

[After graduating in 1951, Li Zhensheng was assigned to the Chinese Academy of Sciences because of his outstanding abilities. He was initially responsible for forage research]

[But a few years later, he responded to the country's call to support the construction of the western region, when a famine occurred in the western region.]

[Due to wheat rust, wheat yields dropped by 30%. Li Zhensheng and his colleagues were urgently assigned to develop hybrid disease-resistant wheat]

[Those who have not lived in rural areas may not know what wheat rust is. It comes from the infection of wheat by rust fungi, which will form large areas of rust-like patches on the wheat, hindering photosynthesis and causing water loss.]

[Infected wheat may fail to produce full grains at best, or wither and die at worst. The rust fungus can spread among wheat, causing great harm.]

[For China, which was not rich at the time, hunger was approaching step by step. In the face of the crisis, all colleagues chose to crossbreed wheat with better resistance with existing wheat, which is the so-called close hybridization.]

[But Li Zhensheng was worried because he knew very well that there was no member in the entire wheat family that had particularly strong disease resistance.]

[There are only differences between weak, very weak, and super weak. No matter how much hybridization is done, it will be the same. After three to five years, the rust fungus will mutate and immediately flood the wheat fields.]

Because of his experiences in his youth, Zhu Yuanzhang attached great importance to farming. Therefore, when he heard about the "drought and a 3% reduction in wheat production", he frowned.

If officials in the disaster-stricken areas handle this situation improperly, chaos will occur.

The sky screen added photos of wheat rust at the right time. You can see that it is small yellow spots gathered on the wheat leaves in strips. From a distance, you might think that the leaves have turned yellow.

This disease is caused by "rust bacteria" and is contagious.

In this case, aren't pests and diseases usually controlled directly?

Zhu Yuanzhang was very puzzled, but the next second Tianmu explained the reason.

“Disease resistance!”

Although I am still very confused about close hybridization, if I think about this sentence carefully, it is obvious that the intention of later generations to study hybrid wheat is to make wheat resistant to diseases!
what?
Zhu Biao thought he had heard it wrong, but when he saw the confused expressions of his ministers, he knew he had heard it right.

Hexing Tea and Snack Shop.

The diners all knew something about farming, and by now they had realized what was happening. How could this be possible?

Make wheat disease-resistant?
Or is hybrid wheat mainly for the purpose of making wheat resistant to diseases? Or other abilities?

Mr. Su, Manager Wan, and the shop assistant tried their best to imagine, but people cannot imagine things they have never seen, so even though they racked their brains, they still couldn't think of what other abilities Xiaomai could acquire.

But even if it is only the disease resistance aspect, if the cultivated wheat seeds are really successful and can solve the problem of wheat being affected by insect pests and diseases once and for all, it will also be a disguised increase in production.

"Biology is the study of biology." Mr. Su murmured. It turns out that biology is not only used in medicine. It is an extremely mysterious field, and people still know very little about it.

One is bacteria, one is virus, and the other is rice hybridization, close hybridization of wheat, and probably distant hybridization of wheat.

Wait, I didn’t record any content about bacteria.
Nanjun in the late Han Dynasty.

After understanding the huge information contained in Tianmu's words, Zhuge Liang and others' faces changed again and again.

Zhuge Liang thought faster and more deeply than others. He took a deep breath and spoke slowly.

"The hybridization of wheat relatives is actually a bit like breeding, similar to the breeding of different horses."

"There is close hybridization, and I'm afraid there is also distant hybridization, similar to the breeding of donkeys and horses."

At this point, everyone's faces changed drastically. It was obvious that Tianmu said that the wheat family did not have any varieties with strong disease resistance, which meant that they had to start hybridizing wheat and other plants.

A donkey and a horse can breed a mule, but a mule cannot produce offspring.
"If this research is successful, can it be extended to other crops?" Pang Tong continued thinking about the topic. The other crops he mentioned were crops other than rice and wheat. There was no doubt that this research was successful.

Because Tianmu had mentioned hybrid rice before, and Li Zhensheng mentioned in Tianmu was known as the "Northern Li" in "Southern Yuan and Northern Li", it was obvious that his research on hybridization of wheat and rice was successful.

Liu Bei's eyes turned red, this is a national hero.

Zhuge Liang struggled internally for a while, but still couldn't help but say: "If we regard wheat's disease resistance as a certain characteristic, and apply this technology to other animals, then..."

When Pang Tong heard this, he seemed to have thought of something, and then his face changed drastically, with eyes full of disbelief.
The others who were a little slower to react also came to their senses. Suddenly, they opened their mouths wide as if they had seen a ghost and could not speak.
Isn’t the Classic of Mountains and Seas a legend?

[Li Zhensheng hopes to break the limitation of intra-family marriage and allow wheat to marry other types of plants, which is the so-called distant hybridization]

[The blind date he found for wheat was the forage grass he had studied before. Forage grass has strong disease resistance and can grow well without much care. It is also almost immune to rust.]

[Li Zhensheng hopes to transfer the disease resistance of forage grass to wheat through distant hybridization, solving the problem once and for all]

[The theory is good, but it is very difficult to implement in practice. Li Zhensheng has been doing this for nearly 20 years]

[Over the years, the criticism and doubts that have been made have been like knives stabbing into Li Zhensheng's heart. Some people say that he is so crazy that he is planning to cross-breed grass with wheat.]

[Some people say that he has been trying to attract attention for so many years without success, and he should have announced that the experiment had failed long ago. He is just insisting on it for the sake of his own face and wasting the country's resources.]

[In order to protect his research project, Li Zhensheng worked several times harder than others. While doing distant hybridization, he also worked overtime to develop the mainstream near-distant hybrid wheat at the time, which was recognized and promoted.]

[It was not until 1979 that Li Zhensheng finally made a breakthrough. After thousands of long experiments, he selected the most suitable long-spiked wheatgrass from more than 800 kinds of forage grasses, and after hybridizing it with wheat, he obtained Xiaoyan No. 6]

[Xiaoyan No. 6 has extremely strong disease resistance and is immune to 8 old diseases. It also has a high yield and good grain quality. It was the most powerful hybrid wheat variety at the time.]

During the Zhenguan period, Jinling City.

Although they knew the ending, everyone was still shocked when the sky curtain was really mentioned.

This is another idea to increase grain production. So far, Tianmu has mentioned many ways to increase grain production.

The simplest of these is undoubtedly fertilizer and crop rotation, followed by nationwide seed selection and breeding. Li Shimin thinks that this scope can be relaxed further. The next step is to look for high-yield crops and hybridize them with wheat.

The difficulty in finding high-yield crops is the vast ocean and the lack of mature shipping routes. It is extremely difficult to cross the ocean to the American continent and accurately find sweet potatoes.

Wheat hybridization is a bit similar to donkey-horse hybridization, which may be easier than finding high-yield crops. The only difficulty is that the specific details of the hybridization are not yet known, and the workload of hybrid breeding is huge, requiring repeated experiments and extremely long test cycles.

But what about the specific details of wheat hybridization?

Li Shimin suddenly thought of a possibility, Tianmu would not skip such an important content.
[The knowledge required for wheat hybridization technology is not profound. Anyone who has studied junior high school biology knows that it is artificial pollination.]

[Wheat has a compound spike inflorescence, with more than a dozen spikelets on each spikelet. There is a guard glume on each side of the spikelet, and there are 2-3 flowers in the guard glume]

[There is usually one pistil and three stamens in a flower, and the stamens and pistils mature at the same time]

[When wheat blooms, the lodicules absorb water and expand rapidly, stretching the inner and outer palea, the filaments of the stamens continue to lengthen, and the three anthers crack from the top to release thousands of pollen grains.]

[As long as there is one pollen in the pistil, pollination is successful]

During the Hongwu period, Jinling City.

In front of the Wuying Hall, the emperor and his ministers were like students studying, constantly absorbing the knowledge of the celestial being.

In particular, it is accompanied by corresponding visual explanations. After knowing the details of wheat pollination, most people have actually understood the principles of wheat hybridization.

Sure enough, the principles are correct, but there are many differences in the details.

"According to this idea, can we cultivate a variety of crops, such as drought-resistant and cold-resistant wheat?" Zhu Yuanzhang was excited. If the research was successful, even if the yield per mu was only half of the current wheat, it would still be a considerable grain output. You know, there are so many wastelands across the country that are not cultivated because of drought or poor soil.

If this kind of wheat variety really exists, and if policies are followed to guide this part of the land to collect less tax or no tax, it will also be a source of grain income. If it is spread out over time, the increase in grain production will be very considerable.

Let’s look at the science of biology today. Hybrid rice and hybrid wheat, and bacteria and viruses, just these two things, this science has saved countless lives.

"Biology is so powerful." Zhu Yuanzhang developed a strong interest in this mysterious subject and wondered what surprises it could bring.

He was not a pedantic person, on the contrary he was very practical. So after he understood the obvious benefits brought by these studies, he became less and less interested in the so-called Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism.

Useless learning!

(End of this chapter)