Article on Paul Stamets/ Shrooms: Not Just For Salad Anymore

Shrooms: Not Just For Salad Anymore

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

A visionary biologist says mushrooms are potent
antiviral and
antibacterial agents, as well as key boosters to
the human immune
system. They also might end up saving the Earth.

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.

"There are very few people capable of combining
the breadth of
understanding and the academic rigor to naturally
based problem
solutions than Paul," says Dr. Eric Rasmussen,
formerly of the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the
Pentagon's high risk,
high-payoff scientific entity. "His combination
of factors in his
intellect and experience are a somewhat rare
combination. And his work
is likely to prove to have significant benefit to
the United States."

(Though he would not discuss details, Stamets
says he has isolated a
strain of mushroom from the Old Growth forest
that has shown activity
against viruses that could be potentially
weaponized.)

Dr. Donald Abrams, who is collaborating with
Stamets on a National
Institutes of Health-funded trial to investigate
the effects of the
oyster mushroom in lowering cholesterol in people
taking HIV therapies,
concurs. The study is the first medical mushroom
clinical study in the
U.S.

"I think that Paul Stamets is a visionary thinker
and a passionate
spokesperson for the Mushroom Kingdom," said
Abrams, a researcher at
the University of California San Francisco School
of Medicine. "I am
always engrossed in his articulate presentations
of the power of
mushrooms in healing people and indeed the
planet."

Phil Stern of Yet2 says that for all Stamets'
scientific acumen, at the
end of the day, he's about his beliefs.

"One of the best things about Paul is not just
his groundbreaking
technology but his principals," says Stern. "He
says, 'If I license
this product to you, you have to uphold these
principals.' I respect
his integrity."

Fungal Intelligence

Stamets has a few things working against him,
especially when promoting
his ideas in the mental lockdown of 21st century
America. He did, after
all, conduct now famous research on psilocybin
hallucinogenic mushrooms
at Evergreen State College in the late 1970s. And
he wrote "Psilocybin
Mushrooms of the World."

What's more, to conservative minds, the
trippy-dippiness of some of his
ideas can come off as silliness. In one breath,
for example, he ticks
off a riveting observation that neurological
landscape looks like
mycelium or that brain neurons and the Internet
share mycelia's basic
structural arrangements. In another he talks of
"fungal intelligence"
or ability to use spores to put life on other
planets.

In the draft of his new book, "Mycelium Running:
Growing Mushrooms to
Heal People and Planet." Stamets writes that,
"The mycelium is an
exposed sentient membrane, aware and responsive
to changes in its
environment. I especially feel this when I enter
a forest after a
rainfall. Interlacing mycelial membranes form, I
believe, a complex
neuron-like web that acts as a fungal collective
consciousness."

Whether or not corporate investors will ever vibe
with the fungal
collective consciousness, Stamets says his ideas
are helped by a shift
in scientific culture that's more accepting of
non-western, natural
solutions to problems.

And he's never short of evidence to back his
theories.

"The idea that a cellular organism demonstrates
intelligence may seem
radical if not for work by researchers like
Toshuyiki Nakagami,
published in Nature 2000," Stamets writes. "He
placed a maze over the
nutrient agar filled Petri dish and introduced
nutritious oat flakes at
the entrance and exit. He then inoculated the
entrance with a culture
of the slime mold Physarum polycephallum under
sterile conditions. It
grew through the maze and consistently chose the
shortest route to the
oat flakes at the end. Rejecting dead-ends, the
slime mold
demonstrated, according to the researchers, a
form of intelligence."

That intelligence, according to Stamets, might
one day be used to
extend life throughout the solar system.
Mushrooms are the first
organism to restart an ecosystem after
catastrophes like tornadoes or
forest fires, popping up from the ground to
return nutrients back to
the food chain. The mushrooms' scent attracts
insects which then
attracts birds and animals that bring in seeds,
creating a life
generation domino effect that underscores the
possibility of using
fungi for creating habitats on other worlds.

For now, his most secure convictions are planted
here on Earth.

"I believe ecosystems are conscious," he says.
"These mycelia networks,
like the Internet, share information on changes
in the environment such
as the availability of new food sources or
responses to cataclysmic
changes. So really these are information sharing
networks. I think they
are microneurological networks and I think
science will prove they have
a form of consciousness that we do not
recognize."

Kelly Hearn is a correspondent for The Christian
Science Monitor and a
former science and technology writer for UPI
http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/19680/


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