Swaminathan


	Council, and the Advisory Panel on Food Security, Agriculture, Forestry and the Environment to the World Commission on Environment and Development. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy and of the Royal Society of London, and of the Science Academies of China, Italy, Sweden, the United States and the then USSR. Besides the World Food Prize he has won a number of international awards, including, in 1986, the Albert Einstein Prize. In recent years, the funds associated with some of these awards have been used to set up a modern research center at Madras, the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, of which he is Chairman. He has served as President of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) from 1984 to 1990 and is currently President of the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences, India, and the World-Wide Fund for Nature in India.


	orn in Tamil Nadu, India, in 1925, Dr Swaminathan was educated at Travancore and Madras Universities before receiving his PhD in genetics at Cambridge University in 1952. For the next 20 years he worked at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi, mainly in wheat improvement. It was during this period that he and Nobel Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug, founder of what later became ICARDA's sister Center CIMMYT, were leading figures in a successful attempt to avert food catastrophe in South Asia and elsewhere, largely through the development and transfer of new dwarf wheat varieties that revolutionized food production. In his address, Dr Swaminathan paid generous tribute to Dr Borlaug--and said that he thought CIMMYT (Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maiz y Trigo) and IRRI (the International Rice Research Institute),


	both now part of the CGIAR, had played a leading role in averting disaster in the 1960s. Dr Swaminathan later went on to become Director General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and Secretary of the Department of Agricultural Research and Education, and in 1979 was appointed Principal Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation. From 1980 to 1982 he was Member in charge of agriculture and rural development in India's Planning Commission. In 1982 he became Director General of IRRI, a post he held until January 1988.


	he author of over 200 scientific papers and books, Dr Swaminathan has served with distinction as Chairman of a number of international bodies, including the U.N. Advisory Committee on Science and Technology for Development, the FAO