Shrooms: Not Just For Salad Anymore

By Kelly Hearn, AlterNet. Posted August 29, 2004.

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, 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) are the cornerstone of several Earth-friendly, multi-billion dollar industries. To him, there's no end to what spores can do.

Collaborating with public and private agencies from Batelle 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."

Survivors of Catastrophe

Mushrooms 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 post-cataclysmic debris fields."

Today they are a keystone species spanning large swaths of land and secreting enzymes and acids that break down plant matter (which, lucky enough, has 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 seemingly killer techniques. 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?

Non-Polluting Pesticides

Stamets' key project – which has attracted the attention of Ben DuPont, 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 non-polluting 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.

DuPont'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.

Mad Mycoscientist or Visionary?

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." But he also has a loyal following.

Kelly Hearn is a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and a former science and technology writer for UPI.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »