He is commonly credited with saving as many as a billion lives. By one expert’s calculation, about half the world’s population sleeps better each night for having consumed grain descended from one of the varieties he helped develop. His biographer called him The Man Who Fed the World, and he was one of only five persons ever to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet most Americans have never heard of him.

“In the middle of the 20th century,” Bill Gates recently said at the World Food Prize Symposium, “experts predicted famine and starvation, but they turned out to be wrong—because they did not predict Norman Borlaug.”