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International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms

ISSN for PRINT: 1521-9437

Institutional price:	$538.00
Issues per year:	4

Best Paper Award Selection - Editorial Board Site

2005, Volume7

344 pages

DOI: 10.1615/IntJMedMushr.v7.i12

Issue price - $256.00

Unveiling Africa's Treasures of Medicinal Mushrooms: Contributions of Professor Shu-Ting Chang

Keto E. Mshigeni
ZERI Regional Office For Africa, University Of Namibia, Private Bag 13301, Windhoek, Namibia

ABSTRACT

I first heard Professor Shu-Ting Chang giving a presentation on mushrooms in January 1997, in Windhoek, Namibia. This was on the occasion of our hosting the First International Training Workshop on the Zero Emissions Research Initiative (ZERI) in Africa. ZERI is a zero-waste initiative that was born at the United Nations University (UNU) in Tokyo, which looks at a wide spectrum of materials around us (e.g., the huge tonnage of organic lignocellulosic agricultural crop residues) with a view to transforming them into new value-added marketable products. Professor Chang had been invited to the workshop as one of the key resource persons. At that historic workshop, he delivered two lectures. The first was titled Integrated Mushroom Farming in the ZERI Context (Chang, 1998a); the second was titled Nutritional and Medicinal Properties of Mushrooms (Chang, 1998b). Both lectures enormously impressed me and revealed Professor Chang as a great teacher, who inspires; as a great scholar, who is characterized by astounding depth in his understanding of mushroom science; as a solid scientist, who is remarkably contagious in his appeal toward inspiring love for mushrooms; and as a sage, who is blessed with virtues of humility, kindness, charisma, innovativeness, an inquisitive mind, and a subtle sense of humor. In that memorable meeting of January of 1997, Professor Chang baptized me and captured my love for mushrooms. In this contribution, we shall outline the role that Professor Chang has played since that first encounter toward unveiling Africa's treasures of medicinal and other mushrooms.