Over the past 16 years, it has traveled more than 500000 kilometers and shuttled in the most remote, desolate and difficult places for more than 100 days every year. He led his team to collect 40 million seeds and made an inventory of the biological "family resources" on the roof of the world. On September 25, 2017, Zhong Yang, a famous botanist and professor of the School of Life Sciences of Fudan University, met with an accident on his way to Ordos, Inner Mongolia, and his 53 year old life ended abruptly.

"One seed can change the future of a nation"

In June 2011, on the northern slope of Mount Qomolangma, which is more than 6000 meters above sea level, Zhong Yang led his team to collect alpine snow lotus and climb to the highest sampling height of Chinese botanists. For this moment, Zhong Yang has been brewing for ten years.

In 2001, Zhong Yang went to Tibet for the first time. In the work of Fudan University to rebuild the ecological discipline, he realized that many species are disappearing. As a basic and strategic work, preserving germplasm resources is of great significance to national development and human destiny. He aimed at Tibet, where there were nearly 6000 higher plant species, but no one had ever conducted a thorough inventory and seed collection.

"One gene can change the fate of a country, and one seed can change the future of a nation." This is Zhong Yang's "seed view".

Zhong Yang is going to the "forbidden area of life" to find the "winner" of the plant world, Alpine Snow Lotus.

In 1938, German explorers collected a few centimetres high alpine snowdrop (Snow Hare) on the southern slope of Mount Everest at an altitude of about 6300 meters, and recorded it as the highest distributed higher plant in the world, which was regarded as a classic by international monographs and textbooks on alpine botany. Since then, no one has found this plant.

Since 2011, Zhong Yang has led his team to search for alpine snow lotus. One day in June, they climbed up Mount Everest again, and finally he found it in a rock crevice exposed after the degradation of the glacier. Snowdrop is only 10 cm tall, and it is an inconspicuous plant with small gray pompon flowers. The flower shape is like a thumb

"This discovery enables us to find confidence in the highest altitude distribution plants that have broken the existing world record. Further molecular biological analysis will provide scientific basis for revealing their population origin, dynamics and their relationship with global change."

Zhong Yang wants to make an inventory of "biological family" in the "no man's land". He takes students from Linzhi, Shigatse, Naqu and Ali to collect plant specimens and DNA samples one by one.

In fact, his life could have been very calm.

At the age of 15, Zhong Yang was admitted to the junior class of the University of Science and Technology of China; In his twenties, he became a young leader in the field of botany in China at that time; At the age of 33, when he resigned from the Wuhan Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to work as an ordinary teacher in Fudan University, he was already a deputy department level cadre.

Someone asked Zhong Yang, is it worth picking seeds all day long without any immediate economic benefits? He replied: "Suppose there is cancer more than 100 years later, and another plant is found that can fight cancer, but perhaps because of climate change, this plant has disappeared. People will recall that a professor surnamed Zhong collected it more than 100 years ago."

"Seed Hunter"

Zhong Yang has a "small goal" in mind: to collect 5000 seeds for each seed sample. According to the collection standard, to collect the 5000 seeds, it is not allowed to collect them in one place, but to collect them in a place 50 kilometers away from a straight line.

Laqiong calculated that 5000 seeds collected from one seed sample would run 500 to 1000 kilometers. 800 kilometers a day, traveling at night, is the limit.

The unimaginable hardship is always overcome with more amazing perseverance. Zhong Yang is not unaware of the severe altitude reaction.

Zha Xiciren, director of the Tibet Germplasm Resources Bank, said, "When Mr. Zhong arrived in Tibet University, he didn't say anything but took us to the field. His blood pressure was high, and when he first arrived in Tibet, he had a particularly severe altitude reaction, dizziness, nausea, weakness, and diarrhea, but he never complained. Every morning when he goes out, in order to save the space in his bag as much as possible for sampling, he only takes the simplest things. "

Two loaves of bread, a bag of pickles, and a bottle of mineral water are the simple "old three" that accompanied Zhong Yang for 16 years.

The plateau cedar collected by Zhong Yang's team has extracted anti-cancer ingredients from it and passed the certification of the American Pharmaceutical Association; The Arabidopsis that Zhong Yang's team first found has been provided to global scientific research institutions for free, providing support for global botanical research; Zhong Yang and his student Zha Xiciren spent three years registering the world's only 30000 giant cypresses on the Qinghai Tibet Plateau.

Understanding the Eternal Pursuit of "Zhong Yang Spirit"

On September 29, 2017, the last farewell day arrived.

A banner in memory of Zhong Yang hung on the campus of Fudan University: "Every seed left will take root and sprout in the future." More than 700 wreaths were placed inside and outside the venue of Yinchuan's body farewell party, turning it into a sea of flowers. Colleagues and partners arrived, teachers from dozens of colleges and universities arrived, as well as many primary and secondary students and parents, many of whom had only heard one of his reports.

For more than 20 years, Zhong Yang has spent half his life trekking and half of his life miserable. He has become a major expert of the 863 expert group on biological and medical technology. The textbooks he wrote 18 years ago are still regarded as classics. His many scientific research achievements are well-known internationally, but he has devoted himself to the vast world of snow covered plateau and basic discipline teaching and science popularization for 16 years.

Zhong Yang said that this was the inspiration from the alpine snow lotus: when a species has to meet the challenge of harsh environment to expand its territory, it always needs some pioneers to sacrifice their individual advantages in exchange for the new survival and development of the whole group!

"Every generation has its own spirit and mission," said Chen Jiakuan, a professor at the School of Life Sciences, Fudan University. "From getting rich to becoming strong, our country needs a group of such scientists to make selfless contributions.

Zhong Yang once said, "I want to bring out a group of doctoral teams to form a hematopoietic mechanism for talent cultivation in Tibet. I will certainly not be in the world 100 years later, but my students are here, and sooner or later they will find the seed that will change the destiny of our country." Wen/Xinhua News Agency