How to Change Your Mind

Tucked into the evergreen forest a short walk from his house, the Fungi
Perfecti complex consists of a series of long white metal buildings that
look like Quonset huts or small hangars. Outside are piles of wood chips,
discarded fungi, and growing media. Some of the buildings house the
grow rooms where he raises medicinal and edible species; others contain
his research facility, with clean rooms and laminar flow chambers in
which Stamets reproduces fungi from tissue culture and conducts his
experiments. On the office walls hang several of his patents, framed.
Amid the torrent of words, what I observed in these buildings was a
salutary reminder that while Stamets is surely a big talker, he is not just a
talker. He is a big doer too, a successful researcher and entrepreneur who
is using fungi to make original contributions across a remarkably wide
range of fields, from medicine and environmental restoration to
agriculture and forestry and even national defense. Stamets is in fact a
scientist, albeit of a special kind.
Exactly what kind of scientist I didn’t completely understand until a
few weeks later, when I happened to read a wonderful biography of
Alexander von Humboldt, the great early nineteenth-century German
scientist (and colleague of Goethe’s) who revolutionized our
understanding of the natural world. Humboldt believed it is only with our
feelings, our senses, and our imaginations—that is, with the faculties of
human subjectivity—that we can ever penetrate nature’s secrets. “Nature
everywhere speaks to man in a voice” that is “familiar to his soul.” There
is an order and beauty organizing the system of nature—a system that
Humboldt, after briefly considering the name “Gaia,” chose to call
“Cosmos”—but it would never have revealed itself to us if not for the
human imagination, which is itself of course a product of nature, of the
very system it allows us to comprehend. The modern conceit of the
scientist attempting to observe nature with perfect objectivity, as if from a
vantage located outside it, would have been anathema to Humboldt. “I
myself am identical with nature.”
If Stamets is a scientist, as I believe he is, it is in the Humboldtian
mold, making him something of a throwback. I don’t mean to suggest his
contribution is on the same order as Humboldt’s. But he too is an
amateur in the best sense, self-taught, uncredentialed, and blithe about
trespassing disciplinary borders. He too is an accomplished naturalist
and inventor, with several new species and patents to his credit. He too