April 3, 2018 -- It was till a car accident on the early morning of September 25th, 2017 that people began to know how much Professor Zhong Yang has already achieved in his life.

For 16 years, the professor has persevered his academic research in Tibet, scaling mountain peaks to collect plants seeds and looking for the evolutionary paths of organisms. His footsteps have covered the plateaus of northern Tibet, the mountains of the Himalayas, the no-man’s-zone in Ngari, and the churning waters of Yarlung Tsangpo River. He has collected more than 40 million seeds from around one thousand plants, filling in the blanks for Tibetan seeds in the world data bank.

The difficulty of collecting plant seeds at Tibet, “roof of the world,” was hard to describe for people who have not personally experienced it. Every plant needs 5000 seeds collected, and near-extinct plants need 500 seeds each. To protect the independence of the plants’ hereditary information, each sample had to be collected from at least 50 km apart, which meant that, on these expansive plateaus, one needed to travel as many as 800 km a day. One would leave at five or six am in the morning, arrive at camp at eight or nine pm, and then spend hours cataloging the plant samples, sleeping three hours a night was typical.