Qi Fan Qi Micro Class I wonder if you have heard of the name "Plant Hunter". This is a low-key and mysterious profession that originated in Europe and flourished in the United Kingdom. Their mission is to collect exotic flowers and trees.

Professor Zhong Yang, a botanist from Fudan University, has traveled to every corner of Tibet in the past 16 years, climbed to mountains more than 6,000 meters above sea level, and collected more than 40 million seeds from more than 1,000 species of plants.

There is no doubt that Professor Zhong can be called a seed hunter.

Seeds are of great significance to botanists.

One gene can save a country, and one seed can benefit thousands of people.

Because of global temperature warming, the growing environment of plants will undergo great changes. Some plants may mutate, and some plants may disappear from the earth.

What impact will the disappearance of a plant species have on humans?

Professor Zhong Yang made an interesting analogy. Suppose that a hundred years later, people discovered that a certain plant contained ingredients indispensable for fighting cancer. It would be a pity if this plant had disappeared.

So collect these seeds before biodiversity changes or species become endangered.

Collected in a seed bank, perhaps decades or even hundreds of years later, these seeds will play their role in bringing this disappeared species back to the earth with new vitality.

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has more than 6,000 higher plant species, of which more than 1,000 are unique to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Professor Zhong Yang is keenly aware that Tibet is a rare treasure of biological diversity.

Therefore, he came to Tibet without hesitation, this high-altitude area, and started collecting seeds.

In this sense, Professor Zhong Yang is not just a botanist, but more like a philosopher.

The German Romantic poet Novalis once said that philosophy is to search for home everywhere with an impulse of nostalgia.

It is with this kind of nostalgia that Professor Zhong Yang searches for the home of mankind, looking for the home of mankind hundreds or even thousands of years from now.

What a broad mind and sentiment this is!

Professor Zhong Yang is a genius who graduated from the Youth Class of the University of Science and Technology of China.

After graduation, he was assigned to the Institute of Botany of Wuhan University as a computer talent.

Perhaps it was the call of fate that he, who originally only conducted cold data research, actually became interested in plants.

The ancient lotus seeds buried underground for thousands of years, after careful cultivation by botanists, have taken on new vitality and grown into a pond full of lotus flowers.

This, for Zhong Yang, has a fatal attraction.

He deeply felt the wonder of life and the charm of plants.

He knew that behind the strings of cold data, there were living lives.

From then on, he plunged into the field of botany and was inspired by the plants of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. He traveled to Tibet thousands of miles away to research and collect plateau seeds.

There are so many bell-shaped flowers in the world that appear in carved beams and painted buildings, but only the aloof Tibetan pineapple flower blooms among the mountain gravels.

This is a Tibetan poem that Zhong Yang translated himself and was his favorite.

In order to collect the seeds of hidden pineapple flowers, he climbed up a mountain more than 4,500 meters high.

Due to severe hypoxia, his lips were black and his breathing was short.

However, as soon as this Tibetan pineapple flower growing among the mountain gravel came into view, the bright and tenacious life immediately made him forget all his physical discomfort.

He sighed and couldn't help but chant this little poem repeatedly.

In order to find the seeds of cedar, he led his students to both sides of the Brahmaputra River to register the more than 30,000 giant cypresses remaining in the world.

They discovered a unique plant in Tibetan areas at more than 6,000 meters (this is the extreme limit of human sampling), the "rat, koji, and snow rabbit" with extremely high scientific research value.

After tracking for decades, they finally discovered Arabidopsis, a white mouse in the plant kingdom that grows at an altitude of more than 4,000 meters.

... In the process of searching for seeds, he traveled over mountains and rivers again and again, and suffered from altitude sickness again and again, but he remained determined.

Because although he is a botanist, he has poetic sensitivity and enthusiasm, like a poet, who has been chasing his dream.

Every life has its end one day, but I am not afraid, because my students will continue the path of scientific exploration, and the seeds we collect may take root and sprout one day hundreds of years later.

Fulfill many people’s dreams.

Professor Zhong spent most of each of the sixteen years in Tibet.

He knew very well that the plan of collecting seeds to establish a seed gene bank for the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau could not be completed by one person or one generation.

Therefore, in Tibet, in addition to scientific research, cultivating talents has become the focus of his work.

He mobilized young teachers from Tibet University to apply for doctoral students at Fudan University and trained a group of doctoral and master's students.