Professor Liu Xingzhong is China's top fungus expert. Twice a year for the past two decades, the principal investigator of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Microbiology has obtained government funding for fungus forays in the high mountains and deep valleys. The government wants an economic return from these field trips, but as most fungi that Liu has found have no economic value, funding was stopped this year.
How do you persuade your PhD students, and yourself, to devote a lifetime to studying fungi?
Studying fungi will make you a sharp decision-maker and give you a long life. When you see a spot of mould in the wild, you have no high-resolution microscope and hours to help decide whether it is an interesting species worth collecting. You must make a fast and accurate decision, or you will be lost in the woods forever, let alone regret missing a great find. Making good decisions under pressure requires years of training and practice, and studying fungi can be effective. Some of our students are now high-ranking government officials.
As for the long life, in our lab there is a tradition that only those who make it to 80 get birthday parties, because we have many long-lived professors. The oldest is 105. Fungus researchers spend lots of time handling and examining samples under microscopes - a job that requires absolute peace of mind. I have a PhD student who stormed out and threw up the first time he sat down to study a fungi sample, because he could not focus. But once you are used to it, you are hooked for the rest of your life. You want to spend every second with the samples. When examining a new species under the microscope, you forget about all the unhappiness and ugliness of life, which is why I conclude that studying fungi makes you live long. I don't study fungi for either of those reasons, though. I just want to be happy, and studying fungi makes me very happy.
What is a fungus foray?
We do fungus forays twice a year - three weeks in summer and two weeks in winter. We hire a car and drive to the end of a road early in the morning, abandon it, trudge into remote valleys and mountains until the sun rises directly overhead and the mobile phone signal disappears. Then we have lunch, simple but delicious, and always have soup. In the late afternoon we go back to our car along a different route. We collect as we walk. In the evening, we have dinner at a hotel, often with wine, to celebrate exciting finds before sitting down with microscopes to work. We work until 2am, throw ourselves into bed, wake up at seven and repeat the same thing next day. We sleep only five hours and work like dogs. To fungus researchers, it is the most agreeable time of the year.