long ago have become a vast, uninhabitable waste heap of dead but
undecomposed plants and animals. So after the Exxon Valdez ran
aground off the coast of Alaska in 1989, spilling millions of gallons of
crude oil into Prince William Sound, Stamets revived a long-standing
idea of putting fungi to work breaking down petrochemical waste. He
showed a slide of a steaming heap of oily black sludge before inoculating
it with the spores of oyster mushrooms, and then a second photograph of
the same pile taken four weeks later, when it was reduced by a third and
covered in a thick mantle of snowy white oyster mushrooms. It was a
performance, and a feat of alchemy, I won’t soon forget.
But Stamets’s aspirations for the fungal kingdom go well beyond
turning petrochemical sludge into arable soil. Indeed, in his view there is
scarcely an ecological or medical problem that mushrooms can’t help
solve.
Cancer? Stamets’s extract of turkey tail mushrooms (Trametes
versicolor) has been shown to help cancer patients by stimulating their
immune systems. (Stamets claims to have used it to help cure his
mother’s stage 4 breast cancer.)
Bioterrorism? After 9/11, the federal government’s Bioshield program
asked to screen hundreds of the rare mushroom strains in Stamets’s
collection and found several that showed strong activity against SARS,
smallpox, herpes, and bird and swine flu. (If this strikes you as
implausible, remember that penicillin is the product of a fungus.)
Colony collapse disorder (CCD)? After watching honeybees visiting a
woodpile to nibble on mycelium, Stamets identified several species of
fungus that bolster the bees’ resistance to infection and CCD.
Insect infestation? A few years ago, Stamets won a patent for a
“mycopesticide”—a mutant mycelium from a species of Cordyceps that,
after being eaten by carpenter ants, colonizes their bodies and kills them,
but not before chemically inducing the ant to climb to the highest point in
its environment and then bursting a mushroom from the top of its head
that releases its spores to the wind.
The second or third time I watched Stamets show a video of a
Cordyceps doing its diabolical thing to an ant—commandeering its body,
making it do its bidding, and then exploding a mushroom from its brain
in order to disseminate its genes—it occurred to me that Stamets and that
poor ant had rather a lot in common. Fungi haven’t killed him, it’s true,
frankie
(Frankie)
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