Fungi: key to human and environmental health

7/28/2019 Fungi: key to human and environmental health

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_Vcrusading m ycolog is t says fungi a re key to hum an and env i ronm enta l hea l th -

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F or Paul Stamets, the phrase "mush-room hunt does not denote a leisurelystroll with a napkin-lined basket. Thismorning, a half-dozen of us are strugglingin keep up with the mycologist as hecharges through a fir-and-alder forest onCortes Island, British Columbia. It's rainingsteadily, and the moss beneath our feet isslick, but Stamets, 57, b arrels across it like agrizzly bear heading for a stump full ofhoney. He v aults over fallen trees, scramblesup muddy ravines, plows through shin-deeppuddles in his rubber boots. He never slowsdown, but he halts abruptly whenever aspecimen demands his attention.

This outing is part of a workshop on thefungi commonly known as mushrooms -a class of organisms wh ose cell walls arestiffened by a molecule called chitin insteadof the cellulose found in plants, and whosemost ardent scientific evangelist is the manahead of us. Stamets is trying to find apatch of chanterelles, a variety known forits exquisite flavor. But the species that stophim in his tracks, and bring a look o f blissto his bushy-bearded face, possess qualitiesfar beyond the culinary.

He points to a clutch of plump oystermushrooms halfway up an alder trunk."These could clean up oil spills all over theplanet," he says. lie ducks beneath a rottinglog, where a rare, beehive-like Agarikondangles. "'this could provide a defenseagainst weaponized smallpox." He plucks atiny, gray Mycena alcalina from the soil andholds it under our noses. "Sm ell that? Itseems to be outgassing chlorine." ToStamets, that suggests it can break downtoxic chlorine-based polychlorinated

biphenvls, or PCBs.Most Americans think of

mushrooms as ingredients insoup or intruders on a well-tend-ed lawn. Stamets, however,cherishes a grander vision, onetrumpeted in the subtitle of his2005 book, M ycelium Running. -How Mushroom s Can Help Save

funded mostly by the profits from hisprivate company, Fungi Perfecti, which sellsgourmet and medicinal mushrooms (alongwith growing kits, mushroom-derivedsupplements and mushroom-related booksand knickknacks) by mail order and athealth food stores. With his Woodstockianhirsuteness and frank enthusiasm formushrooms of the psychoactive sort,Stamets often comes across more as ahippie mystic than a dispassionatescientist. "Our bodies and our environs arehabitats with immune systems," he writesin Mycelium Running, and fungi "are acommon bridge between the two." Hedescribes mycelium, the web of fibroustissue from which mushrooms spring, as"the neurological network of nature," a

"sentient membrane' thathas "the long-term health ofthe host environment inmind." To some, suchlanguage seems uncomfort-ably metaphysical.

Yet Stamets' ideas havegained an expandingaudience among main-stream scientists, environ-mental engineers, federalofficials and Silicon Valleyinvestors. His 2008 talk atthe TED Conference, theannual hajj of tech baronsand thought leaders, hassnagged morehan 1.5

million hits since it was posted online; italso earned Stamets invitations tobrainstorming sessions with Bill Gates,Amazon CE OJeffBezos and the guys whorun Google.

"It helps that he's brilliant," says EricRasmussen, a former Defense Departmentscientist and disaster expert collaboratingwith Stamets to decontaminate the zonearoundJapan's Fukushima nuclear reactorwith mushrooms. Rasmussen comparesStamets to visionary entrepreneur-scien-tists like Thom as Edison or "som e of thetruly fine amateur naturalists or astrono-mers of the 17th and 18th centuries - peo-ple who were experts in their fields, but hadother ways to occupy their days."

Stamets occupies some of his daysteaching fungus aficionados and would-bemycotechnologists, both here at theeco-oriented Hollyhock Lifelong LearningCentre and at his mushroom farm inWashington state. He runs a business thathas 47 employees and ships goodsworldwide. Somehow, he also manages tojuggle a diverse array of experiments -often in tandem with researchers atuniversities or nonprofit outfits - aimedat finding fungal solutions to globalproblems. "The path to the future," he likesto say, "is the path of the mycelium."

However poetically expressed. Stamets'notion that mushrooms bridge human andenvironmental immune systems isgrounded in solid biology On the evolu-tionary tree, the animal and fungalkingdoms sprout from the same branch,

M y c o r r h i z a l fu n g i , w h i c h f o rm m u s h r o o m s ,penetratetree r oot s w i t h m yce l l a , cont r i b ut i ng n i t r ogen andm i n e r a l s a l t s i n e x c h a n g e f o r s u g a r s .

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.Above-ground\fruiting bodyBelow-groundmycelium

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the World. Mushroom-producing t h r o u g h t hfungi, he believes, can serve asgame changers in fields asdisparate as medicine, forestry,pesticides and pollution control.He has spent the past quarter-century preaching that gospel toanyone who will listen.

If his data were less persuasive, he mightbe dismissed as an eccentric myco-utopianStamets has no regular academic orinstitutional affiliation; his research is

f o r e s t , th e yu p . T h e y k n n wyou 're thE .

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Scanning electron microscope images of human brain cells (left) and mushroom mycelium.

splitting from each other long after plantsdiverged. And fungi knit together the livesof plants, animals and the Earth itself insome very concrete ways.

There are an estimated 1.5 millionspecies of fungi, comprising yeasts andmolds along with mushroom-producingmacrofungi. All these organisms sharecertain basic traits with animals: 'lhevinhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide,as we do, and they are susceptible to manyof the same germs. Like us, they get theirenergy by consuming other life forms ratherthan by photosynthesis.

But a fungus's body is radically differentfrom an animal's. Yeasts are unicellular,while molds and macrofungi take the formof mycelia, networks of threadlike mem-branes, each a single cell thick, that caninfest a rotting orange, infiltrate acres ofwoodland or fuse together to make amushroom. Mycelia absorb nutrients fromtheir surroundings and can rapidly changetheir growth patterns and other behavior inresponse to the environment.

"They have cellular intelligence" Stametssays. "When you walk through the forest,they leap up in search of debris to feed on.They know you're there."

When fungi colonized land a billionyears ago, some established a niche asEarth's great decomposers - key to thecreation of soil. Their mycelia exudeenzymes and acids that turn rock intobiologically accessible minerals andunravel the long-chain molecules oforganic matter into digestible form. Fungalmycelia hold soil together, help it retainwater and make its nutrients available tovegetation. Species known as mycorrhizalfungi use their mycelia to envelop orpenetrate plant roots, contributingnitrogen compounds and mineral salts inexchange for sugars from the hostorganism. (When a sapling is languishingin the shade of a larger tree, these fungi cansense the problem and send the youngsterextra nourishment.) Mushroom-producingfungi feed animals; animals return thefavor by spreading fungal spores.

To ward off pathogens, fungi havedeveloped an arsenal of antibacterial andantiviral compounds - a resource thattraditional peoples harnessed in the formOf mushroom teas and foodstuffs. Alexan-der Fleming exploited them in more

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modern fashion when he isolated penicillinfrom the Penicillium rubens mold in 1929.Fungi can also parasitize and kill insects,including those troublesome to us.

For millennia, humans have exploitedmicrofungi (molds and yeasts) to createedibles such as cheese, bread, beer andwine. But in Western culture, Stametsobserves, the powers of macrofungi havebeen largely ignored, an attitude he refersto as "m vcophobia" or "biological racism."Mushrooms were relegated to the Camp-bell's can, or outlawed when they blew toomany minds. They were discounted,devalued, shunted aside.

Just as Paul Stamets was, before hefound his own mycelial path.

To understand how Stamets came tobelieve mushrooms could save the world, ithelps to know bow they saved Stamets.

He was born in 1955 in Salem, Ohio, oneof four brothers. His father, an engineer,owned a firm that oversaw constructionprojects for the U.S. A rmy. Stamets was a

shy kid with a crippling stutter whodreamed of becoming a trailblazingscientist, "We lived in a big house w ith alab in the basement," he recalls, "and Ilooked up every experiment I could find."He nearly blew the place up on severaloccasions while tinkering with chemicals.

Then, when he was 12, his father'sbusiness failed and the family splintered.Stamets' mother decamped with him andhis twin brother to a small apartment inColumbiana, Ohio, where they lived inpoverty. Eventually, she moved with theboys to her own parents' vacation homenear Seattle and sent them on scholarshipto a boarding school in Pennsylvania.Stamets felt like a misfit among preppies.He threw himself into martial arts (laterearning black belts in both tae kwon doand hwa rang do) and identified with thecounterculture that was reaching its crest.

During his senior year. Stamets and hisbrother were expelled for selling marijuanato fellow students. They hitchhiked back toSeattle, where they finished high school at apublic institution. Stamets spent a summer

'.he cottonyjyceliumof a GardenWhen you look at a mushroom, what you're seeing is aiantmushroomfungus's fruit. It emerges from a mass of fibrous tissue' 'rows onknown as mycelium, which penetrates whatever material'Yermentedthe mushroom is growing on. To the naked eye, mycelium..' - &ood chips.resembles cottony fluff or cobwebs. Viewed through anelectron microscope, however, it's an intricate weave of branching, threadlike membranes whosestructure, Stamets notes, resembles a network of brain cells. And that, he argues, is evidence thatfungi possess a kind of intelligence.

The analogies are striking. Brains and mycelia grow new connections, or prune ex isting ones, inresponse to environmental stimuli. Both use an array of chemical messengers to transmit signalsthroughout a cellular web. (One part of a mycelium, for example, can order another to send nutrientsfrom hundreds of feet away.) The similar structures of fungal and neural networks, Stamets believes,reflect the fact that both systems evolved to do similar jobs - and do them with maximum efficiency.

But he doesn't stop there. Stamets perceives mycelium-like patterns in the information architectureof the Internet, in the matrices of string theory, in computer models of the web of dark m attesuffusing the cosmos. Such recurrences, he believes, are signs of an evolutionary intelligencegoverning reality itself. "Nature tends to build on its successes," he writes in his book MyceliumPunning. "The mycelial archetype can be seen throughout the universe." - KM

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Against a backdrop of evergreens in Shelton, Wash., Fungi Perfecti supplies mushrooms to a growing market.

toiling as a sawmill hand before enrollingat Kenyon C ollege in Ohio. But he still feltout of place and spent hours wandering inthe woods off campus.

That's where he headed the day he triedhallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms forthe first time. Ile climbed a tree, but wastoo intoxicated to climb down. Soon athunderstorm blew in, and he was lashedby rain and wind. As lightning strucknearby, he realized he could die at anymoment, yet the scene was overwhelm-ingly beautiful. He felt part of the forestand the universe as never before. Hereflected on his life and how to change it."Stop stuttering now, Paul," he told himself,repeating the phrase like a mantra.

When the weather calmed, he climbeddown and hiked home. On his street, he raninto a neighbor whose attractiveness hadalways intensified his stammer. "H i," shesaid. "1-low are you today?"

"Fine, thanks," he answered, with anease that astonished him. 'And you?"

From that moment, Stamets' tonguebegan to come untied, and he devotedhimself to learning about the fungi that hecredited with the change. With the help ofa mushroom-identification book, he foundpsilocybes growing wherever he looked,and he began to probe the mysteries ofother species as well.

The following summer, he dropped outand took a logging job. But the morefascinated he became with mushrooms(hallucinogenic and otherwise), the worsehe felt about helping to destroy theirhabitat. After three crew buddies werekilled in logging-related accidents, Stametsdecided to try school again, this time atEvergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.He wanted to become a mycologist.

Evergreen didn't have a mycologydepartment, but it encouraged indepen-

Although he's obsessed with finding new usesfor mushrooms, Stamets is also a passionatescholar of ancient mycotechnology. He oftenwears one example: a traditional Transylva-nian hat made of amadou, the spongy innerlayer of horse's hoof fungus (Fomesfomen far/us), which can be processed into awarm, feltlike fabric. Highly flammable,amadou has also served as tinder for flintlockguns and prehistoric campfires. (Otzi, the5,000-year-old "ice man" found in an Alpineglacier, was carrying the stuff in his pouch.)Its absorbent and antimicrobial propertiesmade it ideal for dressing wounds andpreserving foods. And amadou was the firstmedicinal mushroom on record: "Hippocratesdescribed it in 450 B.C. as an anti-inflamma-tory," Stamets notes. - KM

dent study. An environmental chemistnamed Michael Beug offered a course onmushrooms, and Stamets balgered himinto becoming his adviser. "I've never had astudent who was more driven," says Beug,who intensified his mycology research tokeep up with Stamets. (Beug also secured alicense from the Drug EnforcementAdministration allowing him and hisstudents to work with psilocybin mush-rooms.) Stamets learned to run the school'sscanning electron microscope - a rarity inthe 1970s - and was soon photographingthe cell structures of mushrooms, myceliaand spores for scientists nationwide.

By the time he graduated in 1979,Stamets had been tutored by some ofAmerica's leading academic mycologists.He w as an accomplished field scientist,laboratory researcher and taxonomist. Hehad discovered several new Psilocybespecies and published a book on the genus.He w as an expert cultivator, too. Yet gradschool seemed economically out of reach.Stamets had recently married a womanwith three kids of her own, and the couple'sfirst child was on the way. To support hisfamily, he remained at Evergreen as anadjunct professor and started a businesswith a research arm on the side.Fungi Perfecti's first lab and grow roomoccupied the basement of Stamets' rentedhouse. He began selling exotic culinarymushrooms and holding seminars for thepaying public. Then, after a 19 83 trip toChina with two of his mentors (mycologistGary Lincoff and physician Andrew W eil,on his way to fame as a natural-healthguru), Starnets became one of the first U.S.cultivators to branch into Asian medicinalvarieties. Later that year, he published TheMushroom Cult ii'atoi; a book still widely

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Garden Giant mushroom! Mycelial wastewater filtration system and Culinary delight.

In 1984 Stamets dove into his businessfrom relatives, he

E. co/i from sewage

Stamets couldn't afford a new system.

A marshy depression called a swale

Garden Giant (Strophariamushrooms, A year after

ource of

Technicians from a Seattle-based

bacteria as an eco-friendlier alternative tothe conventional way of cleaning up suchcontamination - which was to truck theaff'ected soil to a landfill and replace it withclean dirt. But bacteria can have trouble

ambient temperature and oxygen levels.A few researchers had begun experi-

menting with fungi instead. It had longbeen known that mold and mushroomspecies called 'white rot" fungi could eatthe lignin in wood, using enzymes toconvert its complex hydrocarbons intonutritious carbohydrates. Molds alsosometimes colonize fuel tanks, where theyuse those same enzymes to consumepetroleum products. In the lab, a white-rotmold called Phanerochaete chrysoporiumhad shown particular thoroughness atdigesting oil, but it often failed to performunder outdoor conditions. The Envirosstaff hoped to find a hardier fungus, and

Stamets suggested they try oystermushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus), anaggressive white-rotter that could growpractically anywhere. He sent them someoyster mushroom spawn. The technicianscovered it with oil, most of which wasconsumed within three weeks; mush-rooms were popping up through the muck.But Enviros went bankrupt before thework could proceed further.

Meanwhile, Stamets began installingexperimental mycelial wastewaterfiltration systems for other farmers(eventually with funding from the countyand the state), improving on his initialdesign by encasing Stropharia spawn andwood chips in burlap sacks and packingthem into ditches placed to catchmaximum runoff. He began touting themethod in environmental journals, and in1996 he was approached by PacificNorthwest National Laboratory, operatedby the Battelle Memorial Institute, known

reaking down petroleum's largestolecules, and they're finicky about43

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Petroleum-eating oyster mushrooms resembling those above can remediate soil contam nated by oil spills.

for technological solutions to energy and Stamets' team added layers of myceliated mycoforestry and mycopesticides (most ofenvironmental issues. Although initial wood chips to one pile and covered it with a which are terms he coined). I-Ic beganinterest was in Stamets' wastewater work, shade cloth. Two of the piles were treated amassing a genetic library of hundreds ofexcitement grew when lie mciii ioned his only with bacterial cultures or chemical mushroom strains-athered on hikesforay into oil-spill remediation. fertilizers. One pile was left as a control. through the old-growth forests of the

Stamets and the Battelle team began Four weeks later, the myceliated sample Northwest and on trips to Europe, Asia,lab work to maximize the mushroom's was light brown, sweet-smelling and South America and Australia-hat couldpetrolum-eating efficacy. From his bursting with mushrooms-ome more he used for environmental as well asresearch on psilocybes, he knew that than 12 inches in diameter. Insects came to medicinal healing.different strains of a single mushroom eat the fungi, and their larvae attracted The EPA asked Stamets to help thespecies can have wildly varying levels of birds, which likely deposited seeds. After Coast Guard find ways to clean upchemical activity. So the team grew a few nine weeks, the pile was covered with waterborne oil spills. In response, hedozen strains of oyster mushroom, flourishing plants. Aromatic hydrocarbons invented the mycoboom, a burlap tubetesting each for oil-digesting ability in had dropped to less than 200 ppm, suitable filled with oyster mushrooms designed topeiri dishes in the lab. for freeway landscaping. break down petroleum while floating on a

The strains that consumed oil fastest "The other piles," Stamets recalls, slick or barricading a beach. Battellewere selected for further trials, and in "remained dead, dark and stinky" researchers tested his fungal strains1998, the team used the top performers in The mushrooms had won. against neurotoxins and found onean experiment sponsored by the Washing- potent variety of psilocybin mushroomton State Department of Transportation at; highly effective at breaking down VXa maintenance yard in Bellingham. Soil at C AiliL WT nerve gas. Stamets collaborated with thethe site was contaminated with diesel fuel By then, Stamets was obsessed with the Washington State Department of Naturalat up to 20,000 parts per million, similar to possibilities of what he called "mycoresto- Resources on another successful heldconcentrations on Alaskan beaches after ration," a nascent field encompassing his experiment, plant ing mushrooms on oldthe Exxon Valdez oil spill. That spring, own and other researchers' work in logging roads to prevent silt and pollut-WSDO'I' scooped out four piles of dirt, mycofiltration, mycoremediation, ants from clogging streams. He improved

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4a-,'..Mushroom cultures are propagated at the FungiPerfecti farm and sold as part of its growing kits.

Growing room manager Justin Tulloss inspects Lion's Mane mushrooms (Hericium erinaceus) at FungiPerfecti. At right, mycorestoration project coordinator Katie Brownson works in the production facilities.

crop yields on farms and sped upreforestation in woodlands by addingmycorrhizal fungi to soil. In one case heplanted broccoli together with elm oystermushrooms; in another, he dippedDouglas fit' seedlings into a slurry ofpuffball mushroom spores. He inventedthe Life Box, a cardboard carton impreg-nated with tree seeds and symbiotic fungi.After use (for shipping shoes boughtonline, for example), the box could be tornapart and planted to replace the trees usedin its manufacture.

Rut the invention with the greatestimmediate impact on Stamets' ownenvironment grew out of his relationshipwith herbal medicine practitioner Carolyn"Dusty" Yao, which began in 1997 after hisfirst marriage fell apart. (Stamets and Yaowere married, with Andrew Weil officiat-ing, four years later.) When Yao moved in,she was dismayed to find that Stamets' oldfarmhouse was infested with carpenterants - attracted, ironically, by a white-totfungus that was crumbling the floor joists.Stamets, who had ignored the problem foryears, promised to take care of it.

Ile wanted to use a natural pesticidethat was nontoxic to humans: unsurpris-ingly, he began looking for one derivedfrom fungi. He knew that a few moldspecies could infect insects with theirspores, killing them in the process. (Insome cases, a tiny mushroom pops

through the corpse's skull.) Yet existingmvcopesticides worked poorly againstsocial insects, which could smell thespores and stop workers carrying themfrom entering the nest.

Stamets smelled a challenge. He sentaway for a sam ple of Metarhizizirnanisopliae mold, known to kill termitesand carpenter ants when its spores aresprayed on them directl\ His idea was totrain the fungus, which normally producesspores nonstop, to hold off until the antshad carried it into the nest. In its pre-sporulating form, he thought, the insectsmight be attracted to Metarhiziumas asource of nutrition. Once they ate it, themycelium would consume them in return.

When Stamets cultured the mold in hislab, a white circle of mycelium spread overthe petri dish from the point of inocula-tion; it was soon covered with greenspores. He transferred bits of the mold toother dishes, where they reproduced forseveral generations. Eventually, whitestripes emerged amid the green in onedish, where the mycelium(perhaps due to a damagedgene) was lagging in its..spore production. Hethen took some of thewhite

itulturedmore generations,breeding a mutant strain

ofMetarhiziumwhose sporulation cyclewas delayed for days or longer.

Stamets grew his developmentallydelayed mycelium on rice. When it wasready, he put a teaspoon of the spawn on adollhouse dish belonging to his then-teen-age daughter, LaD ena, and placed it on thekitchen floor. That night, she ran to hisbedroom yelling, "Wake up! You've got tosee this! '[he dish was swarming with ants,which were carrying grains of myceliatedrice back inside the walls. Two weeks later,the house was ant-free, and remained thatway from then on. After the insects died,Stamets hypothesized, the smell of theirmoldy bodies warned others away.

Further testing showed that other strainsof M. anisopliae and another mold,Beauvaria bassiana, could also be modifiedto attract and then exterminate a widevariety of bugs. In 2003, Stam ets patented

-,1

Ants succumb to the pesticide powerof greenMetarhizium fungus, grown in

the petri dish at left and disguised as food.

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Reishi mushrooms are used to produce the antibiotic ganomycin.

Lion's Mane mushrooms might be useful forregenerating nerves and treating Alzheimer's.

his method and licensed it to a companythat planned to bring it to market.

He used the proceeds to tear down hisdecaying house and build a new one, withcedar walls, a soaring roofline and ageothermal heating system. A stained-glasswindow dominates the living room,depicting the cosmos entwined with amycelium-like network of dark matter.

Across the meadow from Stamets' homesits a cluster of hangar-size white metalsheds and Quonset huts: Fungi Perfecti'soffices, labs and grow rooms. Inside,workers tend to fruiting maitake mush-rooms for medicinal teas, stuff plastic bagswith oyster mushroom spawn for home-growing kits, or propagate fungal culturesin clean rooms equipped with airlocks andlaminar-flow benches. These days, however,the company's fastest-growing product line(co-created byYao, now his partner invirtually all enterprises) is a line ofnutraceutical mushroom extracts, soldthrough another facility a few m iles away.

According to FDA regulations, anutraceutical manufacturer can't claim itsproducts are able to treat any particularillness. So Fungi Perfecti markets itstinctures as general immune-systemboosters and antioxidants. But mush-

rooms are known to contain a host ofproven disease-fighting chemicals,including polysaccharides, glycoproteins,ergosterols and triterpenoids, as well asantimicrobial and antiviral compounds,all varying according to species andstrain. Indeed, a handful of pharmaceuti-cal medications are derived from mush-rooms, including the antibiotics ganomy-cm (from reishi mushrooms) and camp-estrin (from meadow mushrooms) and thechemotherapy drugs calvaci n (from giantpuffballs) and Illudin S (from the glow-in-the-dark jack-o'-lantern mushrooms).

Stamm is working aggressively to addto that list, and over the past decade, hehas initiated or consulted on alozenlaboratory and clinical trials aimed atderiving novel mushroom-based drugs.After the 9/11 attacks, for example, he senthundreds of samples to the federalBioshield program, whose mission is todevelop defenses against biologicalweapons. Several of his proprietary strainsof Agarikon (Fomitopsis o fficinalis) showedstrong activity against H1N1 swine flu andH5N1 bird flu, as well as viruses in thesmallpox family. Stamets furnishedcapsules of freeze-dried fungus for aseven-year, NIH-funded study by BastyrUniversity and the University of Minne-sota to determine whether turkey tailmushrooms could help breast cancerpatients whose immune systems had beencompromised by radiation therapy. Lastyear, the researchers announced thatnatural-killer cell activity, CD8 T-cellcounts and other immune functionsimproved significantly with the treatment.

Stamets' mother, by coincidence, wasdiagnosed with stage IV metastatic breastcancer in 2009, at age 83. Although shewas ineligible for the trial, he put her onturkey tail capsules to supplement herconventional chemotherapy drugs, Taxoland Herceptin. After six months, PatriciaStamets' tumor disappeared, and todayshe remains cancer-free. Though a singleanecdote falls far short of proof, the deeplyreligious woman credits prayer as well asmushrooms for her return to health.

Divine intervention notwithstanding,progress toward Stamets' mycotechnologi-cal promised land has been slow. His

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development. Hislarge-scale basis. When he

eepwater Horizon oil spill, officialsYet momentum maybe building. Last

firm, New-

aste left by drillers. In New

renowned environmentaltamets-

And then there's Stamets' plan to

riven meltdown, he posted an

Stamets' proposal was simple. First,

substrate.

Replant native trees along with mycorrhi-zal fungi, which will help the trees growwhile drawing radioactive material fromthe soil. Harvest the mushrooms as soonas they form, and dispose of them asnuclear waste. Repeat as necessary forseveral decades or even centuries until theGeiger counters stop screaming. Thealternative, he pointed out, was to cartaway millions of tons of soil and bury it asnuclear waste, taking up far more landfillspace and deprivingJapan of some of itsbest farmland and forestland forever.

The blog post went viral, although evenmany hardcore mycophiles assumed theplan was hypothetical. Eric Rasmussen,however, believed it was worth a try. Theveteran disaster-relief coordinator hadmet Stamets nearly a decade earlier at aconference Rasmussen organized onenvironmental issues in refugee camps."Paul had a lot of clever ideas that seemedboth benign and effective, which is a rarecombination," Rasmussen recalls. The twobecame close friends.

Last year, aiming to make the NuclearForest Recovery Zone a reality, Stametspartnered with Battelle researchers at theEnergy Department's former nuclearproduction facility in Hanford, Wash., totest various mushroom species for theirability to take up cesium, Results areexpected within the next few months.

Stamets, as usual, is optimistic. "I knowsome of my hypotheses sound ratherextraordinary," he says. "I may be a littleweird, but I'd rather be weird and rightthan normal and wrong."

Kenneth Miller is a Los Angeles freelance writerwho contributes frequently to DISCOVER.

Wastewater filtration Mushroom myceliacould cleanse runoff from storm drains, farms orlogging roads. They could be used to filter out thenitrates, endocrine disrupters and pharmaceuti-cal residues that disrupt ecosystems and damagehuman health.PesticidesFungal bug-killers could be used totarget troublesome species while remainingnontoxic to others.Medicines Mushrooms could provide newantibiotic, antiviral and immune-boostingcompounds and even chemotherapies.Forestry Planting symbiotic mushroom speciescould speed reforestation in clear-cut woodlands.Agriculture Adding mycorrhizal fungi to soilcould improve crop yields without the need fortoxic chemical fertilizers.Famine relief Mushrooms could be grownrapidly in refugee camps and disaster zones, usingJ ust wood chips or saltwater-soaked straw.Biofuels Growing mushrooms for biodiesel couldrequire far less soil and other resources thancommonly cultivated fuel crops.Space travel Because of their usefulness in soilcreation, and the tolerance of many species forradiation, mushrooms could be grown by interstellarvoyagers and used to tarraform other worlds. - KM

Agarikon(Fomitopsisoff/dna/us)mushrooms r -ould protectagainst birdflu, swine fluand smallpox.

U'

AS

FluSlimyspike-capmushrooms

-.Uomphidius"lutinosus)

can uptakeradioactive

.' esium-137.

M U S H R O O M ST O T H E R E S C U E

4tamets is researching a wide variety of waysin which fungi could help solve human problems.Here is a partial list:Environmental cleanup Mushrooms couldbe used to break down petrochemicals or absorbradiation from contaminated soil and water.

was diagnosed with breast cancer.

06 See more pictures from the mushroom farm at www.DiscoverMagazine.com/Mushrooms 707/08.2013

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Fungi: key to human and environmental health