Gastn Guzmn

Diagnoses

Personal

Vocation

Mexican mycologist and anthropologist, who was an authority on the genus Psilocybe. He wrote a comprehensive monograph on the subject in 1983, The Genus Psilocybe: A Systematic Revision of the Known Species Including the History, Distribution and Chemistry of the Hallucinogenic Species. He also authored eight other books and over 350 papers on Mexican mushrooms and described more than 200 new taxa of fungi worldwide. More than half of the known psilocybin mushroom species were first described by Guzmán and his collaborators. A co-founder and former president of the Mexican Mycological Society (1965), he was also president of the Latin American Mycological Association (2000–2002), founded by him in La Habana, Cuba, in 1990. Guzmán held an emeritus research chair at the Ecological Institute of Xalapa where he founded the Department and Herbarium of Fungi which now has more than 50,000 specimens. In 1955 he founded the Mycological Herbarium at the National School of Biological Sciences (ENCB) in Mexico City. ENCB now has more than 100,000 specimens, the most sizable collection in Mexico. Guzmán died of a heart attack in Guadalajara, Mexico on 12 January 2016 at the age of 83. Link to Wikipedia biography