The Real Magic Mushrooms

By Linda Baker, Salon. Posted November 26, 2002.

Once you've heard "renaissance mycologist" Paul Stamets talk about mushrooms, you'll never look at the world -- not to mention your backyard -- in the same way again. The author of two seminal textbooks, "The Mushroom Cultivator" and "Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms," Stamets runs Fungi Perfecti, a family-owned gourmet and medicinal mushroom business in Shelton, Wash. His convictions about the expanding role that mushrooms will play in the development of earth-friendly technologies and medicines have led him to collect and clone more than 250 strains of wild mushrooms -- which he stores in several on- and off-site gene libraries.

Until recently, claims Stamets, mushrooms were largely ignored by the mainstream medical and environmental establishment. Or, as he puts it, "they suffered from biological racism." But Stamets is about to thrust these higher fungi into the 21st century. In collaboration with several public and private agencies, he is pioneering the use of "mycoremediation" and "mycofiltration" technologies. These involve the cultivation of mushrooms to clean up toxic waste sites, improve ecological and human health, and in a particularly timely bit of experimentation, break down chemical warfare agents possessed by Saddam Hussein.

"Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet and the vanguard species in habitat restoration," says Stamets, who predicts that bioremediation using fungi will soon be a billion-dollar industry. "If we just stay at the crest of the mycelial wave, it will take us into heretofore unknown territories that will be just magnificent in their implications."

A former logger turned scanning-electron microscopist, Stamets is not your typical scientist -- a role he obviously relishes. "Some people think I'm a mycological heretic, some people think I'm a mycological revolutionary, and some just think I'm crazy," he says cheerfully. His discussions of mushroom form and function are sprinkled with wide-ranging -- and provocative -- mycological metaphors, among them his belief that "fungal intelligence" provides a framework for understanding everything from string theory in modern physics to the structure of the Internet.

In a recent interview, Stamets also spoke mysteriously of a yet-to-be-unveiled project he calls the "life box," his plan for "regreening the planet" using fungi. "It's totally fun, totally revolutionary. It's going to put smiles on the faces of grandmothers and young children," he says. "And it's going to be the biggest story of the decade."

Statements like those make it tempting to dismiss Stamets as either chock-full of hubris or somewhat deluded. But while many academic mycologists tend to question both his style and his methods, Stamets' status as an innovative entrepreneur is hard to dispute. "Paul has a solid grounding in cultivation and has expanded from that base to show there are other ways of using and cultivating mushrooms than just for food," says Gary Lincoff, author of "The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms." "These are relatively new ideas ... but Paul's got a large spread where he can have experiments going on under his control. And he's getting big-name people to back him."

An advisor and consultant to the Program for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona Medical School and a 1998 recipient of the Collective Heritage Institute's Bioneers Award, Stamets has made converts out of more than one researcher in the mainstream medical and environmental communities.

"He's the most creative thinker I know," says Dr. Donald Abrams, the assistant director of the AIDS program at San Francisco General Hospital and a professor of clinical medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. Abrams says he became interested in the medicinal properties of mushrooms after hearing one of Stamets' lectures. Stamets is now a co-investigator on a grant proposal Abrams is authoring on the anti-HIV properties of oyster mushrooms.

Jack Word, former manager of the marine science lab at Battelle Laboratories in Sequim, Wash., calls Stamets "a visionary." Stamets takes bigger, faster leaps than institutional science, acknowledges Word, who, along with Stamets and several other Battelle researchers, is an applicant on a pending mycoremediation patent. "But most of what Paul sees has eventually been accepted by outside groups. He definitely points us in the right direction."

Although mycoremediation sounds "Brave New World"-ish, the concept behind it is decidedly low tech: think home composting, not genetic engineering. Most gardeners know that a host of microorganisms convert organic material such as rotting vegetables, decaying leaves and coffee grounds into the nutrient-rich soil required for plant growth. Fungi play a key role in this process. In fact, one of their primary roles in the ecosystem is decomposition. (Hence the killer-fungus scenario of many a science fiction novel, not to mention the moldy bread and bath tiles that are the bane of modern existence.)

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