Return of the Fungi

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Return of the Fungi

Postby undead » Wed Jun 09, 2010 1:42 am

Return of the Fungi

Paul Stamets is on a quest to find an endangered mushroom that could cure smallpox, TB, and even bird flu. Can he unlock its secrets before deforestation and climate change wipe it out?

— By Andy Isaacson

Image

IN THE OLD-GROWTH forests of the Pacific Northwest grows a bulbous, prehistoric-looking mushroom called agarikon. It prefers to colonize century-old Douglas fir trees, growing out of their trunks like an ugly mole on a finger. When I first met Paul Stamets, a mycologist who has spent more than three decades hunting, studying, and tripping on mushrooms, he had found only two of these unusual fungi, each time by accident—or, as he might put it, divine intervention.

Stamets believes that unlocking agar­i­kon's secrets may be as important to the future of human health as Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillium mold's antibiotic properties more than 80 years ago. And so on a sunny July day, Stamets is setting off on a voyage along the coastal islands of southern British Columbia in hopes of bagging more of the endangered fungus before deforestation or climate change irreparably alters the ecosystems where it makes its home. Agarikon may be ready to save us—but we may have to save it first.

Joining Stamets on the 43-foot schooner Misty Isles are his wife, Dusty, a few close friends, and four research assistants from Fungi Perfecti, his Olympia, Washington-based company, which sells medicinal mushroom extracts, edible mushroom kits, mushroom doggie treats, and Stamets' most recent treatise, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. "What we're doing here could save millions of lives," he tells me on the first morning of the three-day, 120-mile voyage. "It's fun, it's bizarre, and very much borders on something spiritual."

A few months earlier, the University of Illinois-Chicago's Institute for Tuberculosis Research sent Stamets its analysis of a dozen agarikon strains that he'd cultured in his own lab. The institute found the fungus to be extraordinarily active against XDR-TB, a rare type of tuberculosis that is resistant to even the most effective drug treatments. Project BioShield, the Department of Health and Human Services' biodefense program, has found that agarikon is highly resistant to many flu viruses including, when combined with other mushrooms, bird flu. And a week before the trip, the National Center for Natural Products Research, a federally funded lab at the University of Mississippi, concluded that it showed resistance to orthopox viruses including smallpox—without any apparent toxicity. The potential implications are obvious: Most Americans under 35 have not been vaccinated for smallpox, and experts fear the current supply of the vaccine may be insufficient in case of a bioterror attack. A bird flu pandemic within the decade is even likelier. Currently, agarikon is being tested to see if it can also fight off the H1N1 swine flu virus.

"When you mention mushrooms people either think magic mushrooms or portobellos. Their eyes glaze over," Stamets laments. That a homely, humble fungus could fight off virulent diseases like smallpox and TB might seem odd, until one realizes that even though the animal kingdom branched off from the fungi kingdom around 650 million years ago, humans and fungi still have nearly half of their DNA in common and are susceptible to many of the same infections. (Referring to fungi as "our ancestors" is one of the many zingers that Stamets likes to feed audiences.)

On the first morning of our journey, agarikon remains elusive. From the deck of the Misty Isles, the white heads of bald eagles pop out of the dense green slopes of Mink Island, generating false sightings of the chalky mushroom in the treetops. "People say, 'Everywhere you mycologists look, you see mushrooms,'" Stamets says, focusing his binoculars. He laughs. "It's true. The thing about mushroom hunters is, they tend to burn an image of a mushroom on their retina. Then you end up overlaying that image on the landscape. The mushrooms seem to jump out at you."

STAMETS IS of medium height and stocky build. His graying beard, round face, and glasses recall Jerry Garcia. As he tells it, mushrooms came into his life because of a humiliating stuttering habit. "I always stared at the ground and couldn't look people in the eye," he recounts. "That's how I found fungi."

He remembers pelting his seven-year-old twin brother with puffball mushrooms, watching the spores explode in his face. But Stamets didn't get serious about mushrooms until he was 18, when he ingested psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. Hallucinating alone in the Ohio countryside, he got caught in a summer thunderstorm and climbed a tree for shelter. Waiting out the storm, Stamets examined his life. "I asked myself, 'Well Paul, why do you stutter so much?' So I repeated, 'Stop stuttering now,' over and over again, hundreds of times. The next morning, someone asked, 'Hi Paul, how are you?' I looked him right in the eye and said, 'I'm fine, how are you?' I didn't even stutter. That was when I realized mushrooms were really important to me."

Not long after his first trip, Stamets enrolled in college but dropped out to work as a logger. He eventually graduated from Olympia's Evergreen State College, whose unofficial motto, Omnia Extares, roughly translates as "Let it all hang out." While studying biology and electron microscopy, he pioneered research on psilocybin, discovering four new species and writing a definitive field guide. Unable to afford grad school, Stamets started Fungi Perfecti and published The Mushroom Cultivator, which remains a classic within the subculture of mushroom enthusiasts. (He once spotted a copy on the bookshelf of one of the directors of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.)

Stamets began distancing himself from the magic mushroom crowd about nine years ago. "The problem with the psychedelic scene," he told me while driving near his vacation home on Cortes Island, the Grateful Dead playing on the stereo, "is that people contemplate their belly buttons and don't get anything done. I wanted to save lives and the ecosystem." Yet he still credits psilocybin with giving him a sense of purpose. Stamets, who has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, used to spend hours executing complex martial arts routines in the mountains as he tripped. "I had these visions of myself as a mycological warrior in defense of the planet."

While studying the medicinal uses of fungi, Stamets built an extensive library of wild mushroom cultures harvested from the virgin forests of the Pacific Northwest. "It's my most valuable asset," he says. In the event of a fire, "everything can burn. I'm grabbing my test tubes and running."

His tinkering has yielded many surprising discoveries about mushrooms and mycelium, the cobweblike, often hidden network of cells that spawns them. He's demonstrated that oyster mushroom mycelium can more effectively restore soils polluted by oil and gasoline than conventional treatments can; in one eight-week experiment, the fungus broke down 95 percent of the hydrocarbons in a diesel-soaked patch of dirt. He's used sacks of woodchips inoculated with oyster mycelium as filters to protect river habitats from pollutants such as farm runoff contaminated with coliform bacteria. Recently, he proved that cellulosic ethanol could be produced with sugars extracted from decomposing fungi.

Insisting that he's merely a "voice for the mycelium," Stamets says he can't really take credit for his discoveries about an extraordinarily diverse and evolutionarily successful kingdom that modern science has scarcely explored. Still, over the past four years, he has filed for twenty-two patents and received four. "I'm up against big bad pharma, and they will try to steal from us. I have no illusions about this," he says. "Truly, it's a David versus Goliath situation." He asserts that after one of his public talks, in which he spoke about his discovery of a fungus that kills carpenter ants and termites by tricking them into eating it, he was approached by two retired pesticide industry executives. Convinced that their former employers would feel threatened by this relatively cheap, nontoxic pesticide, Stamets claims, they advised him to watch his back.

Stamets' mother, a charismatic Christian, believes the only explanation for his unexpected discoveries is that he is chosen. "I'm not that smart," he says. "I was the dumbest one in my family. But I'm just exceptionally lucky. Other mycologists know more about mycopesticidal fungi than I do. They missed it. In the 2,000-year history of Fomitopsis officinalis"—agarikon's scientific name—"I'm the first one to discover it has antiviral properties? I don't get it, either."

"Paul Stamets is a modern example of the amateur scientist from the 17th and 18th century who made wonderful contributions with only their native curiosity and keen sense of observation," explains Eric Rasmussen, a former Navy physician and researcher for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation, who now heads INSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters), a Google-funded nonprofit that develops tech-nology to control disease outbreaks. "He's listened to in a lot of unexpected corners." In 1997, Battelle, a nonprofit R&D lab and a major Defense Department contractor, asked to screen more than two dozen strains of Stamets' fungi. A few years later, it sent him back a classified report revealing the mushrooms to be highly effective in breaking down the neurotoxin VX, the illegal chemical weapon. Soon afterward, DARPA invited Stamets to one of its brainstorming sessions.

In his role as an ambassador for an entire taxonomic kingdom, Stamets has been elevated to something of a cult figure. "I do have some crazies once in a while who believe that I'm the messiah or that we're destined to be together," he said, by way of explaining the tight security around his Olympia compound. "That's sort of unnerving." While we explored Cortes Island the day before setting sail, he occasionally texted with Leonardo DiCaprio, who had featured Stamets in his documentary The 11th Hour. Anthony Kiedis, the singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, had planned to join the agarikon expedition until he broke his foot. Stamets has "hero status in my mind," Kiedis emailed me. "He opens himself up to information about fungi the same way I open myself to a new song that is out there waiting to be found."

Yet for all the acclaim, Stamets is still an outsider without a PhD or an academic or institutional sponsor. That has made it hard for his work to be taken seriously in some circles—"We are just weird enough that I think we frighten people," he says—but it's an identity that he ultimately relishes. His inherently positive message—that we can tap a renewable natural resource to solve an array of environmental and medical challenges—has inspired a broad set of followers. Stamets leads workshops on "liberation mycology" and delivered the plenary address at last year's national botany conference. In February 2008, he held forth at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference, the annual conclave of deep thinkers and tech gurus in California. Afterward, Google's founders "ambushed" him with an invitation to their exclusive summer think tank, and Al Gore complimented him on an obscure chemical reference, saying, "You taught me something I didn't know about global warming."

"NOT A SINGLE prospect...was pleasing to the eye," sneered Captain George Vancouver when he named this glacier-carved labyrinth of channels and fjords Desolation Sound after spending a cloudy week here in the summer of 1792. But under the clear July sky, it's sublime: the water a deep, glassy blue, the islands dark green. Afternoon of the first day arrives without an agarikon sighting, so we head ashore to explore a patch of old growth. Stamets' friends joke about his notorious "death marches," but the jaunt proceeds at the leisurely pace of a chanterelle foray.

Fungi were among the first organisms to colonize land 1 billion years ago, long before plants. A visitor to the planet 420 million years ago would have encountered a landscape dominated by fungi such as prototaxites, a bizarre-looking, 30-foot-tall mushroom. Contemporary fungi may be more discreet, but they're just as ubiquitous—and mysterious. Fewer than 7 percent of the estimated 1.5 million species have been cataloged. Mycologists have recently identified 1,200 species of mushrooms in just a few thousand square feet of Guyanese rainforest, half of them previously unknown to science.

As we walk, Stamets points out that the spongy feeling under our feet is a vast subterranean network of mycelium. Stamets refers to mycelium as "nature's Internet," a superhighway of information-sharing membranes that govern the flow of essential nutrients around an ecosystem. A honey mushroom mycelium that covers 2,200 acres in eastern Oregon is thought to be the world's largest organism. When Stamets saw mycelium for the first time, growing like a spiderweb across a log, he brought it home and tacked it onto his bedroom wall. Mycelium's labyrinthine tendrils prevent erosion, retain water, and break down dead plants into ingredients other organisms can use to make soil. Stamets likes to call fungi "soil magicians."

Yet it can be difficult to champion an organism that grows out of poop or decaying wood, can be deceptively toxic, and appears extraterrestrial. Stamets says American society is pervaded by "mycophobia"—an irrational fear of fungi that he traces back to England, whose medical tradition equates mushrooms with decay and decomposition. Stamets has little patience with those who disrespect mushrooms. "I hate the word 'shrooms,'" he says. "Pet peeves: Don't kick mushrooms in my presence and don't use the word 'shrooms.'"

The summer dry season has subdued the mushroom population, but as we walk and my mind becomes more focused they soon pop into view: bracket fungi growing like ledges across a fallen log, a fragile cup-capped mushroom camouflaged in leaf litter. Logging has razed the Pacific Northwest's old growth; less than 20 percent of the original forest is still standing. A handful of mushroom species, including agarikon, depends on this diverse habitat, whose disappearance Stamets views as not just a lost opportunity but a national security concern. The cancer drug Taxol was derived from the bark of Pacific yew trees, a conifer native to the Northwest. (See "Natural Selections.") And tests of 18 of the 28 strains of agarikon Stamets has cultured have found varying levels of antiviral potency, indicating the great diversity even within a single fungus species, adding to the urgency of protecting its dwindling habitat. It's conceivable that the most powerful strain is growing on a tree in a logging concession somewhere.

Foresters long assumed agarikon caused trees to rot, and preemptively logged them. Stamets, however, believes it actually protects trees from parasitic fungi. "The tree says, 'I will accept you, Mr. Agarikon, but I want you to protect me. Give me life, and I will give you my body.'"

In the weeks before our cruise, the National Center for Natural Products Research identified the structures of the molecules responsible for agarikon's antiviral properties. It found the molecules to be more active in the laboratory than the smallpox antiviral Cidofovir. Reverse engineering mushrooms' complex chemical creations to synthesize a new drug is a slow and costly process; Stamets estimates that he's sunk more than $400,000 of his own money into the effort. The next step toward developing a pharmaceutical is mammal studies, a gamble that the venture capitalists he has met with are so far unwilling to fund.

"I've seen the lab results. I know it has potential," says Rasmussen of INSTEDD. "What I don't know is how it performs in clinical trials. And that's a deeply frustrating situation to be in—to see this level of activity against nasty bacteria and viruses and not have the ability to begin clinical trials and work up the scale to human trials and see what the most effective delivery method is, what the dosing needs to be, what the side effects will be—and I think there will be very few. I mean, it's a mushroom, for God's sake." Thus far, the active ingredients in agarikon show no or very little toxicity.

Stamets has long had a hunch that agarikon could be a pharmaceutical powerhouse. He knew from historic texts that other cultures had tapped into its medicinal properties. In the year 65, the Greek physician Dioscorides described it as a treatment for "consumption"—an early name for tuberculosis. A 19th century British text noted that it was still prescribed "to diminish bronchial secretion."

Agarikon was also highly valued by the Coast Salish First Nations peoples of British Columbia. The Haida of British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands are said to have carved the tough, leathery fungus into spirit figures and placed them on the graves of shamans to protect them from evil spirits. Mushrooms also figure prominently in Haida mythology: Women, it is said, came into existence after a "Fungus Man" found shells that resembled vaginas. The Haida knew that boiling agarikon, which they called "ghost bread," into a tea helped with lung problems.

Tragically, they never discovered what Stamets is now finding: that the mycelium running through the tree bark is resistant to smallpox, which decimated the Haida when the British brought the virus to the region in the late 1700s. A few years ago, Stamets visited the Haida Nation's president. Oral traditions had kept the mushroom's reputation alive, but its secrets had been forgotten. "I know my grandmother knew about this fungus," the Haida leader told Stamets, "but after the smallpox epidemic we lost all of our elders, and we lost all of this knowledge."



AS THE MISTY ISLES sails alongside East Redonda Island, all binoculars on deck look for snags—craggy treetops that indicate an old, decaying Douglas fir, agarikon's ideal habitat. The captain, a Canadian named Mike, thinks we'd be interested in seeing some Haida pictographs on the northeast shore. The paintings come into view—crude red shapes on a granite face, sheltered by an overhang. Suddenly, from behind binoculars, a researcher yells, "There's one!" Our attention pivots toward a dense cluster of trees about 100 feet to the left of the pictographs, where I can barely make out a white blob growing on a Douglas fir.

"Oh my, it's huge!" Stamets cries. "It's like the Moby Dick of agarikon...the biggest one I've ever seen in my life! How cosmic, right where the pictographs are! God, you're a beautiful column. It's got to be 70, 100 years old."

Mike anchors Misty and I ride to shore with Stamets in an inflatable boat. We walk to the base of the tree and gaze up at the agarikon, 20 feet off the ground. The fungus is two feet long and resembles a bloated, mutant caterpillar, tubular and segmented. It is growing around a stubby branch poking out from the tree. Stamets believes that it probably fell from higher up, accidentally landed on the branch, and then calcified the wood to provide itself with a sturdy perch—an unusual occurrence he's never seen before.

From the pictograph site, someone calls out that one of the paintings appears to be of Fungus Man. "No way, no way!" Stamets exclaims. "Fungus Man is there? Oh boy, oh boy, I'm getting shivers up and down my spine now." He takes three deep breaths. "We may have discovered a mystery that no one ever knew—that the pictographs exist here because of agarikon. I feel like this is a fulfillment of a dream. We're so lucky. Unbelievable. See, this is the thing about mushrooms: It's not luck. There's something else going on here. We've been guided. But this is what happens. All of our big finds, we have been led." It also happens to be Stamets' 53rd birthday.

Stamets grabs a long stick and reaches up to poke the fungus. It won't budge. He pokes again. "We really shouldn't take it," he concludes. "We should be honored that we found it. This is now supersacred." He lets the agarikon be and walks over to check out the pictographs. Fading from time and the elements, the rock paintings depict a dolphin, a turtle, and a two-foot-high figure with stick arms, big round eyes, and what seems to be a mushroom cap growing out of its round head. Is it Fungus Man?

The afternoon sun is falling behind the island, so we leave the question unresolved and set Misty back on course. Just before dusk we reach the mouth of the Toba Inlet, a fjord carved into Canada's mainland, flanked by high slopes of Douglas fir, red cedar, and alder. We dock at a lone fishing lodge, and from an outdoor hot tub, we enjoy the tranquility that the salty George Vancouver once described as "an awful silence" pervading "the gloomy forest." Captain Mike grills salmon and Stamets con­siders the day's events. "I'm glad we didn't take it," he says. "When I had the stick in my hand, I felt, 'Something doesn't feel right about this.' I thought, 'If this is gonna come down just with a touch, I'll take it. But if it gives me resistance, I'm stopping.'" (He returned the following month with a team of researchers to retrieve samples.)

Toward the end of our last day at sea, Misty turns down the east side of Cortes Island. Stamets spots another agarikon growing 35 feet above the water under the bottom branch of a Douglas fir, sweating beads of amber. He goes ashore for a closer look; while the fungus appears to be dead, he believes the mycelium running up the tree is still alive. Climbing onto an overhanging rock, he finds another one growing in a tree, a sign of an old colony.

Back on deck, Stamets looks across the open water. "How is history going to remember you?" he wonders. "How is Fleming remembered? How are people who have saved millions of lives remembered? I want to die with a smile on my face." He then strips off his clothes and dives into Desolation Sound.
┌∩┐(◕_◕)┌∩┐
User avatar
undead
 
Posts: 997
Joined: Fri May 14, 2010 1:23 am
Location: Doumbekistan
Blog: View Blog (1)

Re: Return of the Fungi

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 09, 2010 1:53 am

Thanks for starting this thread
I have just finished watching part 4 of LOHAS Conference


Excellent

Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Return of the Fungi

Postby undead » Wed Jun 09, 2010 2:15 am

[Note that this article was published 8 years ago]

How mushrooms will save the world

By Linda Baker
Nov 25, 2002

Cleaning up toxic spills, stopping poison-gas attacks and curing deadly diseases: Fungus king Paul Stamets says there's no limit to what his spores can do.

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.)

The same principle is at work in mycoremediation. "We just have a more targeted approach," says Stamets. "And choosing the species [of fungi] that are most effective is absolutely critical to the success of the project."

Fungal decomposition is the job of the mycelium, a vast network of underground cells that permeate the soil. (The mushroom itself is the fruit of the mycelium.) Now recognized as the largest biological entities on the planet, with some individual mycelial mats covering more than 20,000 acres, these fungal masses secrete extra cellular enzymes and acids that break down lignin and cellulose, the two main building blocks of plant fiber, which are formed of long chains of carbon and hydrogen.

As it turns out, such chains are similar enough to the base structure of all petroleum products, pesticides, and herbicides so as to make it possible for fungi to break them down as well. A couple of years ago Stamets partnered with Battelle, a major player in the bioremediation industry, on an experiment conducted on a site owned by the Washington State Department of Transportation in Bellingham. Diesel oil had contaminated the site, which the mycoremediation team inoculated with strains of oyster mycelia that Stamets had collected from old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. Two other bioremediation teams, one using bacteria, the other using engineered bacteria, were also given sections of the contaminated soil to test.

Lo and behold. After four weeks, oyster mushrooms up to 12 inches in diameter had formed on the mycoremediated soil. After eight weeks, 95 percent of the hydrocarbons had broken down, and the soil was deemed nontoxic and suitable for use in WSDOT highway landscaping.

By contrast, neither of the bioremediated sites showed significant changes. "It's only hearsay," says Bill Hyde, Stamets' patent attorney, "but the bacterial remediation folks were crying because the [mycoremediation] worked so fast."

And that, says Stamets, was just the beginning of the end of the story. As the mushrooms rotted away, "fungus gnats" moved in to eat the spores. The gnats attracted other insects, which attracted birds, which brought in seeds.

Call it mycotopia.

"The fruit bodies become environmental plateaus for the attraction and succession of other biological communities," Stamets says. "Ours was the only site that became an oasis of life, leading to ecological restoration. That story is probably repeated all over the planet."

At Fungi Perfecti, a rural compound not far from Aberdeen, Wash., signs warn visitors not to enter without an appointment, and security cameras equipped with motion sensors guard several free-standing laboratories and a mushroom "grow" room. "My concerns are personal safety and commercial espionage," says Stamets, explaining that competitors and mycological hangers-on (not always a stable lot, apparently) have a tendency to show up unannounced.

Then there's the small problem of marketing a product associated in some people's minds with illegal substances. In the late 1970s, Stamets did pioneering research at Evergreen State College on psilocybin hallucinogenic mushrooms; he later published a definitive identification guide: "Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World."

"I drew the line a long time ago," says Stamets. "But I'll never be an apologist for that work. Everything I did was covered by a DEA license."

Today, Stamets spends much of his time cloning wild mushrooms. One of his innovations has been identifying strains of mushrooms with the ability to decompose certain toxins and adapting them to new environments. With the benefit of computer clean-room technology, Stamets introduces samples of toxins to mycelia growing on agar culture, then screens the samples to see if the mycelia are actually metabolizing the toxin. You can actually train the mycelia to grow on different media, he says.

As reported in Jane's Defence Weekly, one of Stamets' strains was found to "completely and efficiently degrade" chemical surrogates of VX and sarin, the potent nerve gases Saddam Hussein loaded into his warheads.

"We have a fungal genome that is diverse and present in the old-growth forests," says Stamets. "Hussein does not. If you look on the fungal genome as being soldier candidates protecting the U.S. as our host defense, not only for the ecosystem but for our population ... we should be saving our old-growth forests as a matter of national defense."

Stamets recently collaborated with WSDOT on another mycoremediation project designed to prevent erosion on decommissioned logging roads, which channel silt and pollutants toward stream beds where salmon are reproducing. In a process Stamets terms "mycofiltration," bark and wood chips were placed onto road surfaces and inoculated with fungi. The mycelial networks not only helped to build and retain soil but also filtered out pollutants and sediments and thus mitigated negative impacts on the watershed.

Stamets envisions myriad uses of mycofiltration, one of which involves bridging the gap between ecological and human health. It's been more than 70 years since Alexander Fleming discovered that the mold fungus penicillium was effective against bacteria. And yet, complains Stamets, nobody has paid much attention to the antiviral and antibiotic properties of mushrooms -- partly because Americans, unlike Asian cultures, think mushrooms are meant to be eaten, not prescribed. But with the emergence of multiple antibiotic resistance in hospitals, says Stamets, "a new game is afoot. The cognoscenti of the pharmaceuticals are now actively, and some secretly, looking at mushrooms for novel medicines."

Based on a recent study documenting the ability of a mushroom, Polyporus umbellatus, to completely inhibit the parasite that causes malaria, Stamets has come up with a mycofiltration approach to combating the disease. "We know that these fungi use other microorganisms as food sources," he says. "We know they're producing extracellular antibiotics that are effective against a pantheon of disease microorganisms. We can establish sheet composting using fungi that are specific against the malarial parasites. We can then go far in working with developing countries, in articulating mycelial mats specific to the disease vectors in which these things are being bred."

Stamets is currently shopping this idea around to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a front-runner in the effort to provide vaccinations in developing nations.

Mycotechnology is part of a larger trend toward the use of living systems to solve environmental problems and restore ecosystems. One of the best-known examples is John Todd's "Living Machine," which uses estuary ecosystems powered by sunlight to purify wastewater. "The idea that a total community is more efficient against contaminants than a single Pac Man bug is gaining acceptance," says Jack Word, now with MEC Analytical Systems, an environmental consulting firm. The key challenge facing mycotechnologies, he says, is securing funding to demonstrate their large-scale commercial feasibility.

Stamets is the Johnny Appleseed of mushrooms; he's spreading the gospel about the power of fungi to benefit the world. Issuing a call to mycological arms, Stamets urges gardeners to inoculate their backyards with mycorrhizae, fungi that enter into beneficial relationships with plant roots, and to grow shiitake and other gourmet mushrooms, among the very best decomposers and builders of soil.

But Stamets' vision doesn't stop there. In the conference room at Fungi Perfecti, with a 2,000-year-old carved mushroom stone from Guatemala hovering, shamanlike, over him, he explains his far-reaching theory of mycelial structure.

"Life exists throughout the cosmos and is a consequence of matter in the universe," he says. "Given that premise, when you look at the consequence of matter, and the simple premise of cellular reproduction, which forms a string, which forms a web, which then cross-hatches, what do you have? You have a neurological landscape that looks like mycelium. It's no accident that brain neurons and astrocytes are similarly arranged. It's no accident that the computer Internet is similarly arranged."

"I believe the earth's natural Internet is the mycelial network," he says. "That is the way of nature. If there is any destruction of the neurological landscape, the mycelial network does not die; it's able to adapt, recover and change. That's the whole basis of the computer Internet. The whole design patterns something that has been reproduced through nature and has been evolutionarily successful over millions of years."

The day after being interviewed in late October, Stamets called to point out a New York Times article on self-replicating universes, an article, he suggested, that reinforced his ideas about matter creating life and the generative power of mycelium. In describing the way universes might multiply, the reporter used the following felicitous metaphor: "For some cosmologists, that means universes sprouting from one another in an endless geometric progression, like mushrooms upon mushrooms upon mushrooms."

Where is Stamets going with all this? "I have a strategy for creating ecological footprints on other planets," he says. "By using a consortium of fungi and seeds and other microorganisms, you could actually seed other planets with little plops. You could actually start keystone species and go to creating vegetation on planets."

"I think that's totally doable."
┌∩┐(◕_◕)┌∩┐
User avatar
undead
 
Posts: 997
Joined: Fri May 14, 2010 1:23 am
Location: Doumbekistan
Blog: View Blog (1)

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 154 guests