From left, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky; Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack; House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio; Jeanie Borlaug Laube, daughter of Dr. Norman E. Borlaug; and Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad applaud after a statue of the late Dr. Norman E. Borlaug is unveiled in Statuary Hall on Capitol Hill in Washington on Tuesday, March 25, 2014.WASHINGTON – The father of the so-called Green Revolution has a permanent home in the U.S. Capitol.
Lawmakers unveiled a statue of Norman Borlaug on Tuesday in a ceremony on what would have been his 100th birthday. The Iowa native and University of Minnesota graduate is credited with saving as many as 1 billion people from hunger by creating a type of wheat that was disease resistant and high-yielding.
Borlaug, who died in 2009, won the 1970 Nobel Prize for his work and has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. His likeness will join a group of sculptures that line Statuary Hall in the Capitol, a selection that is limited to only two per state.
“It will be awfully nice to have a miracle worker around here,” House Speaker John Boehner joked at Tuesday’s ceremony.
Borlaug’s statue was created by Benjamin Victor, 35, of South Dakota. His bronze work features Borlaug wearing a hat and a short-sleeved shirt scribbling into a notebook. He has a stoic look on his face and wheat behind him.