Today marks the 52nd installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org titled Heroes of Progress. This column provides a short introduction to heroes who have made an extraordinary contribution to the well-being of humanity. The 51st installment was about Frederick McKinley Jones.

This week our hero is Yuan Longping, a Chinese agronomist dubbed “the father of hybrid rice.” In the early 1970s, Yuan developed the first variant of high-yield hybrid rice. Yuan’s discoveries, coupled with breakthroughs in wheat hybridization in the 1950s and 1960s by our first Hero of Progress, Norman Borlaug, helped usher in the Green Revolution, which reduced the likelihood of famine in most of the world. As rice is the staple food for approximately half the world’s population, by increasing the plant’s yield, Yuan’s work helped save millions of lives. By the late 1990s, the excess yield brought about by Yuan’s hybrid rice fed an additional 100 million Chinese people each year. Today, varieties of Yuan’s rice are grown in more than 60 countries worldwide.

Yuan was born on September 7, 1930, in Beiping, as Beijing was called at the time. The Chinese Civil War (1927–1949), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), and the associated economic turmoil forced Yuan’s family to move extensively around southern China during his early life. Despite the disruptive upbringing, as both of Yuan’s parents were teachers, he and his five siblings received a good education.

In 1949, Yuan finished high school and began studying at the Southwest Agricultural College (now called Southwest University) on the outskirts of Chongqing in Sichuan province. Yuan’s enrollment in college coincided with the victory of the Communist Party of China in the civil war and the party’s consolidation of power across the country. Unfortunately for Yuan, who chose to major in agronomy with a specific focus on crop genetics, the new Chinese leadership presented a problem.

In the early 1950s, there were two primary theories of heredity. The first theory, based on the work of Soviet agronomists such as Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin and Trofim Lysenko, rejected modern genetics and proposed that organisms change over the course of their lives to adapt to altering environmental conditions. Champions of this idea claimed that by modifying a crop’s environmental conditions (such as temperature, exposure to ultraviolet rays, and soil conditions), they could induce positive changes that would be inherited by the plant’s offspring, eventually producing higher yields. 

The other theory of heredity came from Western scientists such as Gregor Mendel (often dubbed “the father of genetics”) and Thomas Hunt Morgan. They believed that understanding genes was essential to understanding heredity. Mendel and Morgan proposed that while a set of genes are specific to each species, variations between individuals of the same species are heritable (meaning they are passed down from parents to their offspring) and occur due to the form each gene takes.

At the time, the Chinese government looked to the Soviet Union for nearly all scientific and technological insight. As such, the Soviet theory of heredity was considered the “truth” in China. Anyone championing alternative scientific ideas could find themselves accused of spreading misinformation and branded as an “enemy of the state.”

At college, Yuan was officially taught the theory of heredity championed by the Soviets. However, outside of class, one of his professors, Guan Xianghuan, who rejected Soviet dogma, privately taught Yuan Western scientific theories. Guan encouraged Yuan to carry out experiments to test both Soviet and Western ideas. While exposure to the Western ideas of heredity served Yuan well for his future career, a few years after mentoring Yuan, Guan was labeled an enemy of the Communist Party for his “Western views.” After years of harassment from the government, Guan took his own life in 1966.

In 1953, Yuan graduated from college and was assigned to teach crop cultivation, breeding, genetics, and Russian at Anjiang Agricultural School, a small college in rural Hunan. During this time, Yuan conducted experiments to modify crops using the Russian theories of heredity. However, when these proved unsuccessful, he secretly read Western scientific magazines on crop science and changed his experiments to test Western methods.

In the late 1950s, Yuan’s work on crop genetics and breeding became far more urgent. Between 1958 and 1960, because of Mao Zedong’s (the leader of the Communist Party) so-called Great Leap Forward—which, among other things, saw the government collectivize agriculture—China was plunged into the worst famine of modern times. Nationwide, tens of millions were dying from starvation, and as Yuan was living in the Hunan countryside, he saw the impact of the famine firsthand.

Yuan saw the bodies of several people who had died from starvation on roadsides. Later in life, Yuan recalled, “There was nothing in the field because hungry people took away all the edible things they could find.” He continued, “Famished, you would eat whatever there was to eat, even grassroots or tree bark. . . . I became even more determined to solve the problem of how to increase food production so that ordinary people would not starve.”

After two years of studying sweet potatoes, in 1960, Yuan switched to researching how to modify rice to create higher-yielding variants. According to Yuan, he switched to rice because rice was the staple food of China and because the government was more likely to support and fund rice research.

In the West, the hybridization of wheat and maize led to tremendous food production breakthroughs and helped feed millions of people. Hybridization of crops means crossbreeding genetically dissimilar crops to produce offspring. Thanks to a process known as heterosis, a hybrid plant is usually more productive and can exhibit greater biomass, growth, or fertility than either parent plant. However, because rice is a self-pollinating plant, most scientists believed rice hybridization and heterosis was impossible.

In 1961, Yuan searched rice fields for months and eventually found what he considered an “outstanding” rice plant with large panicles and full grains. Yuan meticulously collected more than a thousand seeds of this “outstanding” rice and planted them the following year. To Yuan’s shock, the good traits of the parent crop were not passed down to the next generation.

As heterosis is only obvious in the first generation of hybrid crops, after careful analysis, Yuan concluded that this “outstanding” rice was a natural hybrid. This discovery meant that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom at the time, rice could be hybridized.

Despite this important discovery, one of the largest problems facing Yuan was that hybridization requires different male and female plants as parents. As rice is self-pollinating, if the male parts of the rice plant were removed, crossbreeding and hybridization could occur when the remaining female parts accepted foreign pollen from other rice varieties. Unfortunately for Yuan, the time-consuming and delicate process of removing the male parts of the rice plant made that process impractical on a large scale. This predicament led Yuan to hypothesize that if he and his team could find a strain of naturally mutated male-sterile rice (i.e., rice with female parts only), then those plants could be used to hybridize new rice varieties.

In 1964, Yuan and a student spent the summer searching rice fields for these elusive naturally mutated male-sterile rice plants. In a 1966 article in the Chinese Science Bulletin, Yuan reported that he found six individual rice crops that had the potential for hybridization.

Unbeknownst to Yuan, this 1966 publication likely saved his life. At the time, the Cultural Revolution was in full force across China. Posters denouncing Yuan as a counter-revolutionary began appearing across his university, and local officials made plans to imprison him. The state even reserved a spot for him in the “cowshed,” a place in the local prison for dissenting intellectuals. Fortunately, upon reading his publication about naturally mutated male-sterile rice, the director of the national science and technology commission and other provincial and national leaders sent a letter of support to the college in favor of Yuan’s work. Following the letter, Yuan was allowed to continue his work and was even provided greater financial support.

Despite having the six naturally mutated male-sterile rice plants that he wrote about in his 1966 article, Yuan discovered that when these female parts-only plants were hybridized using pollen from other rice strains, their male-sterile traits were not passed down to their offspring. If Yuan couldn’t find a way to ensure that the offspring of the hybridized rice passed on only female parts (i.e., it was male-sterile), it would make widespread hybridization extremely impractical. Given that, Yuan and his team began searching for wild varieties of male-sterile rice, which Yuan thought may exhibit more promising genetical material.

In 1970, beside a railway line in Hainan, at long last, Yuan discovered a male-sterile wild rice plant that scientists refer to as “wild abortive.” Soon after this discovery, Yuan published a paper that outlined how the genetic material from the male-sterile wild rice could potentially be transferred into commercial rice strains. Yuan hypothesized that if that were to happen, the plant’s offspring would still be male-sterile and that the world’s heavily inbred commercial rice strains could be hybridized to produce greater yields.

In 1973, Yuan began harvesting the offspring of the “wild abortive” rice. To Yuan’s delight, the offspring was comprised of tens of thousands of male-sterile rice plants. By the late 1970s, Yuan’s hybrid rice had yields 20–30 percent higher than traditional commercial varieties.

The discovery of high-yield hybrid rice helped to alleviate food insecurity not only in China but in countries across the world. In doing so, Yuan’s rice saved millions of lives.

Throughout the 1980s, Yuan donated his key rice varieties to various domestic and international agronomists and organizations. He and his team trained farmers and introduced his hybrid strains in more than 80 countries worldwide.

By 1991, the United Nations found that 20 percent of the world’s rice output came from the 10 percent of the world’s rice fields that grew Yuan’s hybrid rice. In 1999, it was found that in China alone, the production increases brought about by hybrid rice fed an additional 100 million people each year. Today, a fifth of all rice grown globally originates from Yuan’s hybrids.

Later in life, Yuan became somewhat of a national celebrity in China and was praised extensively by the ruling Communist Party. However, quite unusually for someone of his prominence, he never engaged in politics nor joined the Communist Party.

Yuan was awarded dozens of national and international awards. In 2000, he was awarded the UNESCO Prize for Science, and in 2004, he was awarded the World Food Prize. Four asteroids, a minor planet, and a college in China are named after him.

Throughout his life, Yuan continued to work to make his hybrid varieties even more productive. These advancements included crossbreeding rice with maize to be more nutritious and enriching rice with Vitamin A to help improve people’s eyes. Even as late as 2018, at the age of 87, Yuan and his team created a hybrid rice variety that could grow in salt-rich soil, which helps farmers living near the coast. Yuan died on May 22, 2021, in Changsha, Hunan. In the days following his death, thousands of mourners put flowers and bowls of boiled rice outside the funeral home.

By developing the first variant of high-yield hybrid rice, Yuan’s work has improved the world’s food stability. Despite fierce political resistance early in his career and critics who believed that rice hybridization was impossible, Yuan persevered and proved the naysayers wrong. As a result, he has saved millions of lives, and millions of people eat Yuan’s hybrid rice every day. For these reasons, Yuan Longping is our 52nd Hero of Progress.

In 1993, the average corn yield in the U.S. amounted to 100.7 bushels per acre. That number grew to 175 bushels per acre by 2020. The steady increase in corn yields began in the late 1930s, when yields averaged well below 30 bushels per acre, and accelerated in the 1950s. Since then, yields have been increasing by an average of almost 2 bushels per acre each year.

The National Corn Growers Association’s National Corn Yield Contest, held every December, measures corn yields from America’s most innovative farmers. The contest showcases the potential of cutting-edge farming techniques developed through extensive research and experimentation to improve food production.

The 2020 winner, Don Stall from Michigan, produced a yield of 476.9 bushels per acre. That was over two and a half times the national average—an especially impressive achievement given suboptimal weather conditions, wildfires and the global pandemic that challenged U.S. farmers in 2020. The world record yield for a corn farmer is 619.2 bushels per acre, set just one year earlier by David Hula from Virginia. Hula has set the world record four times, consistently finding ways to raise his yields.

Corn is not the only crop showing significant and consistent improvements in yields. Global production of wheat, for example, hit a new record of 761.6 million tons (Mt) in 2019-20 and was projected to reach an even higher total of 764.9 Mt in the 2020-21 season.

Americans are not the only leaders in food productivity. A massive bumper harvest put Australia on pace for a 60 percent year-on-year increase in overall crop production in 2020, despite the wildfires and drought that plagued the nation for the first few months of last year.

While overall weather conditions do matter, innovation has undoubtedly been key to agricultural gains. David Hula, for example, has developed a detailed process for planting and harvesting crops, which uses variable-rate technology in conjunction with a strip-till system that helps him to use fertilizer precisely and efficiently. New technology also allows Hula to insulate and protect his crops to ensure consistent output.

More broadly, the agricultural world has seen a series of promising breakthroughs, including genome editing, autonomous farming robots, vertical farming and more. Most of these breakthroughs have the effect of making farming easier, more predictable, more efficient and less dependent on the whims of nature.

Agricultural advances fall well in line with Andrew McAfee’s description of dematerialization – a process of using fewer resources in order to produce more goods and services – which he outlined in his 2019 book More from Less. If the current trends continue, the potential for land-sparing is significant.

Increased efficiency could also stimulate further specialization, thus meeting global demand with fewer farmers and freeing up tens of millions of people worldwide to pursue other careers. Just as the Industrial Revolution largely removed the burden of agricultural labor from most Westerners, efficiency gains are likely to result in reduction of farm labor in the developing world.

Some worry that if corn yields continue to increase while the demand for corn and corn-derivative products, like ethanol, remains stagnant, eventually there will be a diminished incentive for corn farmers to continue innovating. That will most likely provide an impetus for corn farmers to come up with new corn product derivatives, apply innovative agricultural techniques to other crops, or simply leave the market.

As corn and other crops become easier and easier to produce, the agricultural labor market will likely experience structural changes, and those will be worth observing. More importantly, given the way that prospects for land-sparing are continuing to develop, we should remain conscious of the ways in which land is used as it continues to be returned to nature.

Any day now, the government of Bangladesh may become the first country to approve the growing of a variety of yellow rice by farmers known as Golden Rice. If so, this would be a momentous victory in a long and exhausting battle fought by scientists and humanitarians to tackle a huge human health problem—a group that’s faced a great deal of opposition by misguided critics of genetically modified foods. 

Compare two plants. Golden Rice and Golden Promise barley are two varieties of crop. The barley was produced in the 1960s by bombarding seeds with gamma rays in a nuclear facility to scramble their genes at random with the aim of producing genetic mutations that might prove to be what geneticists used to call “hopeful monsters.” It is golden only in name, as a marketing gimmick, with sepia-tinged adverts helping to sell its appeal to organic growers and brewers. Despite the involvement of atomic radiation in its creation, it required no special regulatory approval or red tape before being released to be grown by farmers in Britain and elsewhere. It went almost straight from laboratory to field and proved popular and profitable. 

Golden Rice, by contrast, was produced in the 1990s by carefully inserting just two naturally occurring genes known to be safe—from maize and from a common soil bacterium—into a rice plant, disturbing no other genes. It is quite literally golden: its yellow color indicates that it has beta carotene in it, the precursor of vitamin A. It was developed as a humanitarian, non-profit project in an attempt to prevent somewhere between 200,000 and 700,000 people, many of them children, dying prematurely every year in poor countries because of vitamin A deficiency. (Vitamin A deficiency causes children to go blind and lose immune function.) Yet the rice has been ferociously opposed by opponents of GM foods and, partly as a result, has been tied up in red tape for 20 years, preventing it from being grown. One study in 2008 calculated that in India alone 1.38 million person-years of healthy life had been lost for every year the crop has been delayed.

Golden Rice was the brainchild of two scientists, Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer, aimed at helping the 250 million children—predominantly in Asia—who subsist mainly on rice and suffer from vitamin A deficiency. Telling the parents of these children to grow vegetables (most don’t have land), or distributing vitamin capsules—the preferred alternative of some environmental activists—has not proved remotely practical.

Potrykus hit upon the idea of awakening the molecular machinery in the seed of a rice plant—it is active in the leaves—to make vitamin A while casting around for something he could do to help the world towards the end of his career. Within a few years, and with Beyer’s help, he had succeeded. With additional assistance from scientists at the agricultural company Syngenta, organized by Adrian Dubock, they eventually produced a version of Golden Rice that was sufficiently rich in beta carotene to supply all the vitamin A a person needs. (Dubock wrote about the development of Golden Rice here.) With some difficulty, they cleared the many intellectual property hurdles, getting firms to waive their patents so that the rice could be sold or given away. Potrykus and Beyer insisted that the technology be donated free to benefit children suffering from vitamin A deficiency and Syngenta gave up its right to commercialize the product even in rich countries.

Given the scale of human suffering Golden Rice could address, there may be no better example of a purely philanthropic project in the whole of human history. Yet some misguided environmental activists still oppose Golden Rice to this day.

Prominent among these is Greenpeace, the environmental lobby group which now has annual revenues of nearly $300m and a highly-paid chief executive overseeing a sophisticated fund-raising operation. Greenpeace lobbied to set very strict rules on the use of genetically-engineered crops which had the effect, whether intended or not, of making life difficult for Potrykus and Beyer. In January 2000, the same month that the development of Golden Rice was announced to the world in Science magazine, there was a meeting in Montreal of delegates from 170 countries working to come up with an international protocol on the regulation of biotechnology. This process had been started the year before in Cartagena, Colombia. Greenpeace was there, both protesting in the streets (“Life before profits!”) and working behind the scenes to draft rules for the delegates.

It was here in Montreal on 29th January 2000 that the “precautionary principle”—one of the lodestars of the environmental movement—was incorporated into an international treaty after days of intensive lobbying by Greenpeace. “We won almost all the points we were pushing for,” boasted a spokesman. The environmental group believed it to be a ‘victory’ that would save lives, but the effect was to hobble the development of Golden Rice for many years. As Potrykus said ruefully: “Once Greenpeace had fixed the regulations to be extremely precautionary, they didn’t have to do much more.”

Most people think the precautionary principle simply says “better safe than sorry” and helps to prevent disasters like the release of Thalidomide for pregnant women. In fact, it goes much further and is often a barrier to innovation. As applied in practice, especially in the European Union, it requires regulators to take into account all possible hazards of a new technology, however implausible, to discount all possible benefits, however plausible, and to ignore all the hazards of existing technologies that might be replaced by the innovation. As Ed Regis puts it in his new book Golden Rice: The Imperiled Birth of a GMO Superfood: “The principle focuses on theoretical or potential risks, those that are only possible or hypothetical, while ignoring the specific and actual harms that restrictions or prohibitions are likely to produce.” In this way, it creates obstacles to anything new.

Bizarrely, the Cartagena Protocol applied this principle to crops bred by the precise insertion of specific genes from other plants but not to the older technique of random genetic scrambling with gamma rays, like Golden Promise barley, even though the potential unknown risk of the latter is clearly greater. The effect on Golden Rice was twofold. First, the requirement for greater regulation tarnished all biotech crops as risky (if they’re safe, how come they have to go through so much regulation?). Second, it made the testing of different varieties impossibly expensive and time-consuming, killing a key part of the innovation process: the trial and error that is always necessary to turn a good idea into a practical product. Thomas Edison tried 6,000 different materials for the filament of a light bulb. Imagine if he had had to get separate regulatory approval for each one.

The European Union’s directive on the deliberate release of genetically modified crops includes the statement that “the precautionary principle has been taken into account in the drafting of this Directive and must be taken into account when implementing it.” This effectively killed off biotechnology on the continent, though Europe happily imports huge quantities of GM soybeans from the Americas today. Since 2005, Canada (which did not sign the Cartagena Protocol) has approved 70 different biotech crops, while the European Union has approved just one—and that took 13 years, by which time the crop was outdated.

To illustrate just how impenetrable the EU’s regulatory thicket is, take the biotech potato developed by the German company BASF in 2005. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) initially approved it, but the European Commission then blocked it, citing the precautionary principle. BASF took the Commission to the European Court of Justice, which ordered another evaluation from the EFSA. This confirmed that the crop was safe and the EU was instructed by the Court to approve its use, which it did. But Hungary’s government then intervened on behalf of green pressure groups, pointing out (Kafka-like) that the EU had based its approval on the first EFSA ruling instead of the second one, even though the two rulings were practically identical. In 2013, eight years after the first approval, the EU General Court upheld Hungary’s complaint. By then BASF had lost interest in banging its head against this precautionary wall, so it withdrew the application, packed up its entire research into biotechnology and moved it to the U.S., which has never signed the Cartagena Protocol. Syngenta did the same.

After a quarter of a century of growing biotech crops in North and South America, Asia and parts of Africa, the evidence is now clear: they have caused no human or animal illness, and have huge environmental benefit, such as greatly reduced pesticide use, less ploughing, lower greenhouse gas emissions, less land required to grow a given quantity of crop, lower costs and higher yields. This is the environmental bounty Europe has missed out on thanks to its over-zealous regulation of GM crops.

Greenpeace, having helped to create the red tape that held up Golden Rice, has campaigned against the crop more or less continuously for two decades. At first it argued that Golden Rice was useless because the very earliest prototype, which contained a daffodil gene, had too little beta carotene to be of any use. It then switched to arguing that a later version, with a maize gene, had too much beta carotene and could be toxic.

Despite these difficulties—including constant verbal attacks on themselves, and physical attacks on their field trials—Potrykus, Beyer, Dubock and their allies refused to give up. By 2012, it was clear from studies in China that the latest version of Golden Rice, grown in secure greenhouses, gave children sufficient beta carotene to make them healthy but could not harm them, and did so far more effectively than feeding them spinach. However, the research caused a fuss. The US-based, Chinese-born researcher followed precisely the approved protocols for the research, which did not describe Golden Rice as a GMO-crop. Nevertheless, the same university which had approved the protocols, then found that not describing Golden Rice as a GMO-crop was an ethical omission. Overall, and without any credible analysis, the university found insufficient evidence that the principle of ‘prior informed consent’ from the subjects of the research had been properly applied, handing the opponents of GM foods a huge propaganda victory at a crucial time. Yet by this date, billions of meals of biotech crops had been eaten all around the world, and three independent reviews of the Chinese research concluded that the trial had been safe and effective. Nevertheless, the reputational harm lingered.

The International Rice Research Institute developed numerous different Golden Rice strains back-crossed into commonly grown varieties, behind tough security barriers because of constant threats from activists encouraged by Greenpeace. Eventually, the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board chose one of the varieties for field testing. They would have liked to have chosen lots of different varieties, because in plant breeding it is always necessary to weed out sports that have for some reason acquired undesirable traits along the way. But the precautionary principle made this impossibly expensive and laborious since it required evaluation in advance of the potential risks of each separate variety. So they had to pick one.

Disastrously, that one variety turned out to have a genetic flaw that made it poor at yielding grain outside the greenhouse. Once again, the environmentalists crowed that the project was doomed.

But the anti-GMO activists didn’t always enjoy universal support within the broader environmentalist movement. One of the founders of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, became so infuriated by the organization’s opposition to Golden Rice that he launched a campaign called Allow Golden Rice Now! on the very day that left-wing activists vandalized a Golden Rice field trial. Moore’s group went on to organize protests at Greenpeace’s offices in Hamburg, Amsterdam, Brussels, Rome and London. In 2015, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the US Patents and Trademark Office rewarded Golden Rice with their Patents For Humanity Award. In 2017, a group of 134 Nobel-prize winners (now expanded to 150) called on Greenpeace and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Program to “cease and desist in its campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general.” They concluded: “How many poor people in the world must die before we consider this a ‘crime against humanity’?”

In 2018, Mark Lynas, a prominent campaigner against biotechnology, switched sides and wrote a book in which he said: “We permanently stirred public hostility to GMO foods throughout pretty much the entire world, and—incredibly—held up the previously unstoppable march of a whole technology. There was only one problem with our stunningly successful worldwide campaign. It wasn’t true.”

By 2017, a new variety of Golden Rice, GR2E, had been tested in the field in the Philippines and shown to be robust, true-breeding, high-yielding and strong in its expression of beta carotene. The IRRI submitted an application to release it to farmers, in the form of eight hefty documents, one more than 800 pages long and detailing the many tests of the physical, nutritional, allergenic, and toxicity done on the plant to show that it could not conceivably be anything other than safe to grow and eat. Probably no crop has ever been so exhaustively evaluated. Thankfully, 2017 was the year the dam began to break. Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US approved Golden Rice as a safe food, though none of them planned to grow it (vitamin A deficiency is rare in these countries). But this only stirred up more ferocious opposition among the usual anti-GMO suspects, who frantically lobbied the governments of India, Bangladesh and the Philippines not to approve the crop.

As Regis summarizes the sorry tale in his book:

The rice had to overcome numerous scientific challenges and extremely burdensome regulatory obstacles. It had to withstand years of constant abuse, opposition, factual distortions, disinformation, and ridicule by anti-GMO individuals and groups. It had to survive the destruction of field test specimens by cyclones, hurricanes, and paid vandals. It had to survive its one major scandal and one major mistake.

More than 13,000 supportive citizens (including Jeff Bezos) have now appealed to the governments of the world, the United Nations and Greenpeace to stop vilifying genetically-modified crops in general and Golden Rice in particular. Yet the United Nations remains in thrall to the opponents. Shockingly, UNICEF’s hefty recent report State of the World’s Children 2019: Children, food and nutrition does not even mention Golden Rice. The World Health Organization continues to ignore the product. In effect, a GMO superfood has been developed that could save the lives of hundreds of thousands of children every year, it’s been proved to be both safe and effective, and yet the world’s leading global health organization has decided to turn a blind eye.

The story of Golden Rice is deeply, deeply shocking. This is not a story of incompetence and ignorance, but of an antediluvian hostility to science and technology. In the end, though, the evidence in favor of Golden Rice proved absolutely overwhelming.

This originally appeared in Quillette.