In the late 1960s, a seemingly ordinary wild plant attracted the attention of a young researcher at an agriculture college in Qianyang, Hunan province. It was a primitive relative of rice cultivars that did not produce pollen. The young man was ecstatic as this was the species he had long searched for and would allow him to generate hybrid rice with higher yields - thanks to heterosis, or hybrid vigour, in which the first generation of a cross between two crop varieties grows better and produces more grains.
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