Gastón Guzmán

Career

He was born in Xalapa, Veracruz, in 1932. His interest in mycology began in 1955 when as a graduate student he decided to update his school's (National Polytechnic Institute) poorly kept collection of fungi. During his early field work he found a large assortment of species about which little was known at the time. This inspired him to choose fungi as the topic of his professional thesis.

In 1957 Guzmán was invited by the University of Mexico to assist Rolf Singer, who would arrive to Mexico the following year to study the hallucinogenic mushroom genus Psilocybe. Guzmán accepted and assisted Singer through his explorations in Mexico. While they were in the Huautla de Jiménez region, in their last day of the expeditions, they met R. Gordon Wasson. For Guzmán it was a "fructiferous meeting."

In 1958, he published his first paper on a blue-staining Psilocybe species and the first paper on the ecology of neurotropic fungi. In 1971, he received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation of New York City, on the recommendation of Richard Evans Schultes to study the genus Psilocybe, which resulted in a comprehensive monograph on the subject in 1983, titled 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 has 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.