Thung personally conducted little to no scientific research in the late 1950s. He was mainly busy organising meetings, attracting funding, and maintaining his international networks. He travelled a lot, the Soviet Union, the United States, Venezuela, Suriname, Togo and China. His last trip was a visit to Braunschweig in West Germany in September 1960, to attend the fourth edition of the Conference on Potato Virus Diseases, an initiative he had launched in 1951.