: Mycologist Paul Stamets believes that mushrooms show evidence of consciousness. –>

That fungus among us is good for more than just eating

By Kelly Hearn

A visionary biologist says mushrooms are potent antiviral and antibacterial agents, as well as key boosters to the human immune system. They also might end up saving the earth. To lots of folks, a middle-aged man who says mushrooms can save the world falls into the category of turbo-freak. But to some environmentalists, scientists and major investors, Paul Stamets is the trippiest of profitable kings.

“Mushrooms restore health both on the personal and ecological level,” says Stamets, a mycologist and owner of Fungi Perfecti, a family-owned mushroom business in Shelton, Wash. “Mushrooms can heal people and the planet.”

Stamets, a former logger turned scanning electron microscopist, is bent on showing that fungal mycelium and mushrooms (the actual mushroom is the fruit of the mycelium) could be the cornerstone to several earth-friendly, multibillion dollar industries. To him, there’s no end to what spores can do.

Collaborating with public and private agencies from Battelle Industries to the National Institutes of Health, Stamets is giving ‘shrooms their 15 minutes of fame, promoting them as antiviral and antibacterial agents, as well as key boosters to the human immune system.

Outside the body, Stamets says he has cloned mycelia and mushrooms that can kill pests, absorb radioactive material, filter toxic wastes and, according to an article in Jane’s Defense Weekly, even degrade surrogates of deadly VX
and sarin gas.

Stamets, who has collected over 250 strains of wild mushrooms, says that until now they were largely ignored by environmentalists and scientists. He has filed for dozens of patents, he says, with more to follow. “Every failure is a cost of tuition of the education you have come to learn,” he says, “You graduate to greater and greater techniques.”

Mushrooms themselves graduated through evolution to become acute survivors that recycle life after devastation. About 250 million years ago, after a massive extinction from a meteorite, Stamets says fungi inherited the earth and “recycled the postcataclysmic debris fields.”

Today they are a keystone species spanning large swaths of land and secreting enzymes and acids that break down plant matter (which, luckily enough, have chemical bonds similar to contaminants like petroleum and pesticides).

“The 21st century will be the century of the biologist,” Stamets says in nod to technologies that are exposing life’s basic microcellular relationships. Teasing apart those relationships has helped Stamets come up with some radically successful models. One aims to stop silt runoff on logging roads, for example, by spreading bark and wood chips that have been coated with mycelia of local native fungal species. The mycelia’s natural filtration properties stop the silt flow and prompt the regrowth of the topsoil.

In another technique he calls “mycorestoration,” Stamets uses fungi to filter out pathogens, silt and chemicals from water (mycofiltration) and to denature toxic wastes. The low-tech devices–which often involve placing the fungi in straw, for example–can be placed around farms, watersheds, factories and roads.

Stamets also uses fungi to hurry the natural decomposition of logs on the forest floor. Knowing that local habitat better evolves when the sequence of decomposition is sped up (rather than burned), Stamets devised a way to put spores in chainsaw oil. The result: when a logger cuts a tree, he also coats it with spores that help it decompose.

As proof of mushrooms’ ability to mop up humanity’s deadly mistakes, Stamets tells of mushrooms growing near Chernobyl that were found to have accumulated high levels of the deadly cesium 137 that leaked from faulty reactors. Why not put mushrooms near environmentally wrecked sites, allowing them to work as a natural immune system?

Stamets’ key project–which has attracted the attention of Ben Du Pont, an investor from the famed family–is U.S. patent number 6,660,290.

Somewhere during his study of the dialectic relationship between fungi and insects, Stamets came up with a way to use one to kill the other. “Mycopesticides,” he says, are nonpolluting tools that could upend the global pesticide industry.

One version of the idea involves using parasitic fungi that act on specific insects. The fungus, which can be presented on tasty foods like grain, kills the pest when digested.

Du Pont’s company, Yet2.com, matches new technologies with bigger business partners. Stamets, however, wouldn’t discuss Yet2’s plans for his pesticides, saying only that the group is involved in talks with major companies.

Kind and undeniably brilliant, Stamets’ passionate, rapid-fire descriptions of fungal experiments and patents can give the feeling he’s a mix of scientist, inventor, environmentalist and snake-oil salesman. He admits he has his detractors (“Some mycologists think I’m a heretic,” he shrugs), but he also has a loyal following.

“There are very few people capable of combining the breadth of understanding and the academic rigor to naturally based problem solutions [like] Paul,” says Dr. Eric Rasmussen, formerly of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s high risk, high-payoff scientific entity. “His combination of factors in his intellect and experience are a somewhat rare combination. And his work is likely to prove to have significant benefit to the United States.”

(Though he would not discuss details, Stamets says he has isolated a strain of mushroom from the Old Growth forest that has shown activity against viruses that could be potentially weaponized.)

Phil Stern of Yet2 says that for all Stamets’ scientific acumen, at the end of the day, he’s about his beliefs.

“One of the best things about Paul is not just his groundbreaking technology but his principals,” says Stern. “He says, ‘If I license this product to you, you have to uphold these principals.’ I respect his integrity.”

Stamets has a few things working against him, especially when promoting his ideas in the mental lockdown of 21st-century America. He did, after all, conduct now-famous research on psilocybin hallucinogenic mushrooms at Evergreen State College in the late 1970s. And he wrote that stoner classic, Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World.

What’s more, to conservative minds, the trippy-dippiness of some of his ideas can come off as silliness. In one breath, for example, he ticks off a riveting observation that our neurological landscape looks like mycelium or that brain neurons and the Internet share mycelia’s basic structural arrangements. In another he talks of “fungal intelligence” or the possibility of using spores to put life on other planets.

In the draft of his new book, Mycelium Running: Growing Mushrooms to Heal People and Planet, Stamets writes that, “The mycelium is an exposed sentient membrane, aware and responsive to changes in its environment. I especially feel this when I enter a forest after a rainfall. Interlacing mycelial membranes form, I believe, a complex neuron-like web that acts as a fungal collective consciousness.”

Whether or not corporate investors will ever vibe with the fungal collective consciousness, Stamets says his ideas are helped by a shift in scientific culture that’s more accepting of non-Western, natural solutions to problems.

And he’s never short of evidence to back his theories.

“The idea that a cellular organism demonstrates intelligence may seem radical if not for work by researchers like Toshuyiki Nakagami, published in Nature 2000,” Stamets writes. “He placed a maze over an agar-filled petri dish and introduced nutritious oat flakes at the entrance and exit. He then inoculated the entrance with a culture of the slime mold Physarum polycephalum under sterile conditions. It grew through the maze and consistently chose the shortest route to the oat flakes at the end. Rejecting dead-ends, the slime mold demonstrated, according to the researchers, a form of intelligence.”

That intelligence, according to Stamets, might one day be used to extend life throughout the solar system. Mushrooms are the first organism to restart an ecosystem after catastrophes like tornadoes or forest fires, popping up from the ground to return nutrients back to the food chain. The mushrooms’ scent attracts insects, which then attract birds and animals that bring in seeds, creating a life generation domino effect that underscores the possibility of using fungi for creating habitats on other worlds.

For now, Stamets’ most secure convictions are planted here on Earth.

“I believe ecosystems are conscious,” he says. “These mycelia networks, like the Internet, share information on changes in the environment such as the availability of new food sources or responses to cataclysmic changes. So really these are information-sharing networks,” he reasons.

“I think science will prove they have a form of consciousness that we do not recognize.”

From the September 22-28, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Crumbs of Knowledge

Ben Schott’s ‘Miscellany’ has everything you never needed to know about food and drink

By Heather Irwin

It’s the rare book that’s made me look into the toilet and really take an interest in finding out just how healthy I am based on the Bristol Stool Form Chart. According to the handy guide before me, normal, er, movements, are apparently somewhere between a three and four–I’ll spare you the descriptive details. Based on my untrained observation, things seem to be working out somewhere between a four and a five for me. I’m not sure how worried I need to be at this point.

Possibly even more cause for concern is that I’ve committed approximately eight Biblical food abominations and I may have possibly been both “squiffy” and “rosinned” in the last 48 hours, according to page 39. I’m not totally sure, but if so, this may explain the bathroom situation. My only consolation is that I can now name with confidence all of the children from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Things do seem to be looking up.

Arriving from across the pond this month is the sequel to Ben Schott’s Original Miscellany, titled Schott’s Food and Drink Miscellany (Bloomsbury USA; $14.95). Defying any real explanation, the book is a 153-page compendium of such bite-sized odd and irrelevant factoids as the aforementioned. Thank goodness, I now know that I can effectively cure a hangover with raw egg, sugar and milk (p. 121) and accurately read my own tea leaves (p. 53). Then again, after reading my own stool, I’m not sure how much more I really want to know about my future–or my past.

But I’m a sucker for totally useless information–the stuff that both concerns and horrifies your friends upon discovering that you actually know. (Horrified or not, I’ll note that I’m a popular teammate choice when it comes to Trivial Pursuit.) Schott’s Food and Drink offers just the kind of totally useless information that clogs the mind from remembering mundane things like where you left your keys and whether you’ve put your pants on.

Just last night, for example, I found myself using terms like the “Scoville Scale” (p. 47) to describe the capsicum content of the chilies in our salsa to people who frankly could care less. I now actually know that habañeros and Scotch bonnets are the hottest by far. That little jalapeño you’re choking on? Please. It’s a mere 2,500 SU’s compared to the habañero’s potential 300,000. Stop yawning, damn it!

Over the water cooler, you can let co-workers know that you’re now an expert in the various ways to prepare and eat dog and that without proper refrigeration it can be a real salmonella hazard (p. 120). Just wait and see who’s about to become employee of the month with handy tips like those!

That, of course, brings me to Toblerone peaks. How many, you may ask, are too many in such a scrumptious and velvety chocolate treat? What is enough? Is there some hidden meaning in the fact that both the 50 and 75 gram chocolate bars have 11 peaks each? The mind wobbles, to quote Kelly Bundy, over such weighty matters.

But to those of us who do not so much eat to live as live to eat, this really is important stuff. We gorge ourselves on the manna–or is it ambrosia? (no, according to p. 66, it is, in fact, manna)–of food trivia. And after gorging, we gourmands are recommended to always have an emetic (p. 11) to help avoid the perils of indigestion. Don’t worry, I had to look that up, too. It means something to make you throw up. Think of the Roman vomitoriums or high school. Eat, purge, eat.

That may not be such a bad idea when it comes to being served giant water bugs. We’re told that they actually taste a lot like Gorgonzola cheese (p. 61), but that one can never really know if one is getting a fresh water bug or not. A better choice, perhaps, would be monkeys, iguanas or armadillos, all of which purportedly taste something like rabbit. Baby wasps, if you like scrambled eggs, go down pretty easy, according to Schott’s descriptions of various odd and exotic foods.

Ack.

All of this Miscellany wackiness arose from a humorous Christmas card that Schott, a professional photographer with a “shockingly short career in advertising,” created a few years ago to effusive response from friends. From 16 pages originally, the cards became increasingly bulky with odd and humorous anecdotes. The first book, Schott’s Original Miscellany, has become an international bestseller, leading to the current food and drink compendium.

What’s so amusing about the book is that, unlike the usual top 10 or record-breaking lists, there is no rhyme or reason to the collection. It is purposely idiosyncratic in its disorder. A schematic of the Last Supper is followed by a description of Chinese bird’s nest soup, followed by the maximum refrigerator and freezer storage times for various foodstuffs. (That live lobster in your fridge is only gonna last two to three days, buddy.) It’s a bit like walking through the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum; you’re constantly amazed at the absurdity of it all, while vacillating between fascination and repulsion.

Among the Miscellany‘s great news is that when visiting England, you can get corn, along with tuna, on your Domino’s Pizza (p. 101). The Japanese, it seems, prefer squid to arrive atop their 30-minutes-or-less slices, while the French go for a little crème fraîche with their super-stuffed crust. Avoid poisoned mushrooms as a topping (you can identify them on p. 142), which are almost as deadly as fugu, the toxic blowfish (p. 138).

Hey, did you know that, contrary to popular belief, Britney Spear’s concert dressing room is not required by contract to contain a bag of pork rinds and spray cheese? In fact, her rider stipulates instead a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and one box of Altoids. One can never be too careful about having fresh breath while stealing the father of some poor girl’s newborn baby, especially after eating Cool Ranch Doritos (p. 146). As for the spray cheese? That’s stipulated in ZZ Top’s contract. The flavor, apparently, is at the host’s discretion, though I can personally vouch for the bacon and cheddar.

I don’t want to give away too much about Schott’s Food and Drink Miscellany, mainly because meandering through the pages and discovering the menagerie of food trivia is the real fun of the book. I will, however, reveal that you can read the complete 1870 menu of the Christmas Day dinner served at Voisin’s in Paris.

Suffice it to say that during that winter, things got pretty economically tough at the local zoo and the keepers were forced to sell the animals off to the highest bidder–which happened to be Voisin’s.

Hey, you don’t see roast camel and cats on just every menu.

From the September 15-21, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.