At Stakman's urging, Borlaug remained at the University for post-graduate study. Working part-time as a forester, completed his M.S. in 1939, earning his Ph.D. in 1942 in the field of plant pathology. In his doctoral thesis, he discussed a fungal rot endemic to the flax plant.
Before Borlaug left graduate school, widespread use of chemical pesticides had begun. Paul Müller had already discovered, in 1939, that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) was a powerful insecticide. During World War II, the United States government made extensive use if DDT, especially in the military, and pushed hard to place agriculture on an industrial footing, with the development of new chemicals to control plant diseases and insects. In 1942, Borlaug went to E. I. duPont de Nemours and Company in Wilmington, Delaware, to apply his expertise in plant pathology to determine the effects these new chemicals had on plants and their diseases. He stayed with du Pon t for two years, researching ways to chemically counteract the fungus and bacteria that attack plants.
In 1944, worried by a succession of crop failures in wheat, the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture asked the Rockefeller Foundation to send a team of agricultural scientists to share the technological advances the United States had made in agronomy with the Mexican people.
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