Zhong Yang: forty million seeds, his gift to the future

Zhong Yang's life can be summed up in the sentence he liked best: "One gene can save a nation. One seed can benefit millions."

He was a professor in the School of Life Sciences at Fudan, a botanist. He could have stayed in Shanghai and had an easy life. In 2001 he made a decision instead: go to Tibet and collect seeds.

Why Tibet? He said the seed banks of the world are a doomsday ark. If a crop ever dies out — to disease, to heat, to a bad decade — the genes sleeping in a vault may be the key to saving millions of people. A plant that vanishes from the fields can be brought back out of a drawer. That was the whole idea. And of the world's known seed resources, the plateau holds one of the most distinctive sets, which almost nobody was collecting.

Collecting at that altitude is paid for with your body. Above 4,000 meters, walking leaves you short of breath, and he kept climbing higher with his students. There is an Arabidopsis that grows near the snow line and that the whole world wants. He took students up the north slope of Everest, past 6,000 meters, and found it — possibly the highest-altitude plant seed ever collected by humans. In sixteen years, season after season, he and his team gathered over a thousand species, forty million seeds. In cold storage those seeds will keep for a hundred years. He said: "In a hundred years I'll be gone and the seeds will still be here. The day they're needed, you take them out and use them."

He had a second seed project: Tibetan students. The botany doctoral program at Tibet University had gone years without candidates. He taught in Shanghai and worked in Tibet at the same time, flying back and forth between the two, and helped build the university's ecology doctorate from nothing and produced its first Tibetan PhDs in botany. He used to say: "Training a student is like collecting a seed. Every seed might become a tree."

In 2015 he had a cerebral hemorrhage and was brought back. The doctors told him not to go up to the plateau again. He rested a short while and went back. The classes were in Tibet, the students were in Tibet, the seeds were in Tibet.

On September 25, 2017, on a work trip to Inner Mongolia, he was in a car accident. He was fifty-three. Going through his things, people found a plan in his computer that he had not finished writing: over the next ten years, collect another ten million seeds.

Some people spend a life planting trees. Some spend a life collecting seeds. The seeds go into cold storage, the hope goes into the future — which is how a scientist says I love you: to people he will never meet.

He was posthumously named a Model of the Times. At the memorial, students came down from Tibet carrying specimens of the plants he had collected on the snow mountains, pressed flat and dried. One of them said: "Our teacher always said a person should leave something behind for the future. Now we understand. He was the seed. What he planted in us will grow into a whole slope up there."

His twin sons once wrote to him: "Dad, you're going to Tibet again. We miss you." They are grown now, and they study plants the way he did. His wife, Zhang Xiaoyan, said later: "He gave the family to the country and the seeds to the future. The three of us accept it. That's who he is."