Dr. Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan, known as the architect of India’s “Green Revolution, was born on 7 August 1925 in Tamil Nadu, India. In 1952, he earned his PhD in genetics from Cambridge University, and then did further studies in Wisconsin, USA where he assisted in establishing an Inter-Regional Potato Introduction Station at Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. He developed methods of distant hybridization, leading to novel and economically valuable genetic combinations.

Dr. Swaminathan turned down a professorship and returned to India to fulfill his passion to make India self sufficient in food. He then joined the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in New Delhi where he built up the wheat and rice germplasm collections, and helped collect over 7000 rice strains from the north-east region of India.

By 1966, Dr. Swaminathan was director of the IARI and spent his time in fields with farmers trying to help improve their productivity. In 1967, he and his team developed a high-yielding wheat variety. He brought into India seeds developed in Mexico by U.S. agricultural guru Norman Borlaug and, after cross-breeding them with India local species, created a wheat plant that yielded much more grain than traditional types. Scientists at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) accomplished the same miracle for rice. These were the breakthroughs of the Green Revolution. However, because of traditional practice in agriculture, there was tremendous hesitance for the adoption of the new seeds developed. To break the resistance of farmers reluctant to switch to unfamiliar seeds, Dr. Swaminathan set up thousands of small test plots all over the northern region of the India where he convinced farmers to plant new wheat varieties. The first harvest with the new seeds was found to be three times greater than the previous year's.

Dr. Swaminathan also became the Director General of IRRI from 1982-1988, where he organized the International Rice Germplasm Centre (IRGC) with an international advisory board. He launched special expeditions to collect wild rices from “hot spot” locations. Dr. Swaminathan also played a critical role in the development of the draft on the Convention on Biological Diversity when he was the President of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.

In July 1988, Dr. Swaminathan established The M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation as a nonprofit organization with the goals of preserving regional ecosystems, developing innovative technology to help realize sustainable agriculture, and promoting the application of ecotechnology in agricultural communities.

Notable among the many awards he has won are the Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership in 1971, the Albert Einstein World Science Award in 1986, the first World Food Prize in 1987, Volvo Environment Prize in 1999, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award in 2000. The Indian government conferred on him Padma Shri in 1967, Padma Bhushan in 1972 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1989.

Dr. Swaminathan also serves as one of the patrons of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agribiotech Applications (ISAAA).