He was a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering known for developing the first hybrid rice varieties in the 1970s, part of the Green Revolution in agriculture.

[7][8][9] His ancestral home is in De'an County, Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province in Southern China.

Yuan began his teaching career at the Anjiang Agricultural School, Hunan Province.

[12] In the 1960s he had the idea of hybridizing rice to increase its yield after reading of similar research that was underway successfully in maize and sorghum.

Although the male parts can be removed, carefully, by hand (to produce female-only flowers), this is not practical on a large scale.

One theory was from Gregor Mendel and Thomas Hunt Morgan and was based on the concept of genes and alleles.

[13] Yuan, as an agricultural student at Southwest University, remained skeptical on both theories and started his own experiments to try and come up with his own conclusions.

Yuan was taught and mentored by some biologists who followed the ideas of Gregor Mendel and Thomas Hunt Morgan.

However, a letter of support for Yuan and his work was received based on his publication about male-sterile rice, sent from Nie Rongzhen, director of the National Science and Technology Commission.

Yuan concluded, "I had learned some background of Mendel and Morgan's theory, and I knew from journal papers that it was proven by experiments and real agricultural applications, such as seedless watermelon.

[12] Yuan considered applying the inheritance rules onto sweet potatoes and wheat since their fast rate of growth made them the practical solutions for the famine.

However, he realized that in Southern China sweet potato was never a part of the daily diet and wheat didn't grow well in that area.

[19] In the 1950s, geneticist J. C. Stephens and a few others hybridized two sorghum varieties found in Africa to create high-yielding offspring.

However, maize and sorghum reproduce mainly through cross-pollination, while rice is a self-pollinating plant, which would make any crossbreeding attempts difficult, for obvious reasons.

In Edmund Ware Sinnott's book Principles of Genetics,[21] it clearly states that self-pollinating plants, like wheat and rice, have experienced long-term selection both by nature and by humans.

He spent a majority of his time in the field, rather than staying confined in a lab or publishing papers.

[9] In 1979, his technique for hybrid rice was introduced into the United States, making it the first case of intellectual property rights transfer in the history of the People's Republic of China.

[6] He was the Director-General of the China National Hybrid Rice R&D Center and appointed Professor at Hunan Agricultural University, Changsha.

[30] At 13:07 on May 22, Yuan Longping died of multiple organ failure at Xiangya Hospital of Central South University [zh] (中南大学湘雅医院) at the age of 90.

[5][31] Considered a national hero,[9] tens of thousands of people sent flowers to the funeral home.