Gebisa Ejeta, MS ’76, PhD ’78, is the first to admit he is not a stop-and-smell-the-roses kind of guy. It’s just not his style. Besides, there’s just too much to do.

“To take time to reflect, to let things sink in, I am not good at,” says the Purdue distinguished professor of agronomy.

But on this day in April, April 3 to be exact, he could not help himself. It had been a tumultuous 24 hours. A day before, the entire family had been rocked when his 21-year-old son, the youngest of the five Ejeta children, was diagnosed with a serious illness.

Late the next morning came a phone call from Ambassador Kenneth Quinn, president of the World Food Prize Foundation.

“He started with a nice compliment on my recent testimony to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” Ejeta recalls. “He then talked about the excellent program they have prepared for the annual World Food Prize presentation in October. I thought he was going to ask me to come out and speak. But I told him I had no plans to attend this year’s event.”

“We would really like you to come out this year,” Quinn insisted.

“When I didn’t respond right away, he repeated, ‘We would like for you to come out this year because you are the 2009 World Food Prize Laureate.’”

For more than two decades, working with a list of collaborators as long as he is tall (at 6 feet 7 inches, Ejeta is easily the tallest laureate), the Ethiopian native has worked with researchers on three continents to study the genetics of sorghum. The science eventually resulted in the development of varieties of sorghum that are resistant to drought and Striga, a parasitic weed that has devasted sorghum for as long as farmers have been planting their crop in the African soil.

The World Food Prize Foundation lauded Ejeta for “dramatically increasing the production and availability of one of the world’s five principal grains and enhancing the food supply of hundreds of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Ejeta hung up the phone and went numb.

Thirty-one scientists and humanitarians have been named World Food Prize Laureates since Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug first presented the prize in 1987. But the odds of a second Purdue researcher winning the $250,000 prize just two years after food scientist Phil Nelson was honored for developing the aseptic storage process for foods is, well, beyond astronomical.

“I think I finally said, ‘Oh, my God,’” Ejeta recalls.

From the emotional depths in which no parent should ever dwell to the emotional heights of which few even dare to dream, all in just 24 hours. It swept Ejeta off his feet and gave him cause, finally, to reflect on the unbelievable journey of his life.

“The human aspect of life, the mix of emotions, hit me. I did not know how to take the sad news from my son’s doctors yesterday with the joyous news I had just heard. I sat here in my office very quietly. I stayed here for a couple of hours. Thinking about everything — my son, my family, my work, my career and my life’s journey from where I started all the way up to now. I thought of all the key people along the way.”

His mind wandered back to Haramaya University in Ethiopia and to his mentor, Brhane Gebrekidan, the school’s plant geneticist.

“He was the one who guided me to plant sciences and plant genetics, the one who convinced me about serving humanity through science,” Ejeta says.

And to Leland House, BS ’51, MS ’53, PhD ’56, whom Ejeta described as “a wonderful strategist, a great humanitarian, a superb mentor and a wise technician in regards to international development” after they worked together at ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) in the Sudan for five years.

“Lee passed on to me advice given to him by his first boss, Ralph Cummings: ‘Don’t lose the forest for the trees,’” Ejeta says. “The overall cause is far bigger than the little tempting victories along the way.

“That continues to remain locked in my mind. As long as I feel that I am headed in the right direction, as long as I continue to stand for what I consider is right, I really don’t waste a lot of energy on what happens in between.”

And he thought of the late Woods Thomas, who was director of International Programs in Agriculture at Purdue. “For some reason, he just embraced me and gave me a lot of confidence,” Ejeta says. “He always asked for my opinion on a number of issues.”

And Lowell Hardin, BS ’39, honorary doctorate ’90, Purdue’s grand old man of agriculture who joined the Purdue faculty prior to World War II. Ejeta drops by his office every week to chat and rarely comes away without a shiny new nugget of knowledge: “I’ve had weekly tutorials with Lowell for 25 years, ever since I joined the faculty.
It’s been a tremendous education for me to rub shoulders with him for my entire Purdue career.”