The Granddaddy Of All Things Mushroom

The Granddaddy Of All Things Mushroom

This story is part of Fungi Week, a deep dive into the myriad ways mushrooms and fungi make the planet a healthier place for all its inhabitants. It is supported by UPIC Health.

Paul Stamets might never have found his life topic if he hadn’t been a painfully shy boy. As a child, he had a severe stutter and dreaded social interactions, spending much of his time staring at the ground. What he found there would come to define his life: Mushrooms. Today, at 70, Stamets is arguably the world’s most famous mycologist, a man whose evangelism for fungi has turned him into both a scientific innovator and a pop-culture icon.

His path to this unlikely role was far from conventional. In his teens, he experimented with psychedelic mushrooms. After eating an entire bag of them, the 17-year-old became so intoxicated that he climbed a tree and couldn’t come down until the effects wore off. As a thunderstorm broke open the sky, he experienced a profound connection with the forest and the universe. “Mushrooms have been central and important to my life ever since,” he later said in an interview, crediting psychedelics with curing his stutter and fear of speaking.

From those chaotic forays grew a disciplined fascination. After studying mycology at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, he became a logger in Washington State, then an author, inventor, entrepreneur and visionary whose work has convinced many that fungi may hold answers to some of humanity’s biggest challenges: Cancer, pollution, even climate change. While most think of mushrooms as dinner ingredients, in his 2005 book Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, Stamets lays out how fungi can be game-changers in medicine, environmental cleanups and the future of the planet. 

His enthusiasm for mushrooms as mysterious, often underestimated phenomena is infectious. Fungi can grow larger than a dozen blue whales or remain too small for the human eye. They can kill other beings and plants, or nurture them with nutrients. Out of an estimated three million or so species of fungi, only about 14,000 mushroom species have been identified. “Beneath our feet lies a vast, invisible world that’s vital to life on Earth,” Stamets wrote in July. “These fungi form underground networks that nourish forests, store carbon and support over 80 percent of plant life. Yet fewer than 10 percent of their biodiversity hotspots are protected. It’s time we recognize fungi as essential allies in conservation and climate solutions.” 

Fungi are as vital to human health as they are to planetary health, according to Stamets. From his home and mushroom farm near Olympia, Stamets has spent decades promoting medicinal mushrooms, most famously in connection with his mother’s illness. In 2009, Patty Stamets was diagnosed with advanced Stage IV breast cancer that had spread to her liver and sternum. Doctors gave her three months to live. Alongside chemotherapy and Herceptin, she took daily doses of Turkey Tail mushroom, grown and prepared by her son. A year later, her scans showed no detectable cancer and she lived for ten more years until she died at 93 years old. In a TEDMED talk in 2011, wearing his signature mushroom-felt hat, Stamets called it “the most important story of my life.”

Researchers caution that this is a single case and that mushrooms should not be seen as a cure on their own. But clinical studies have indeed shown that Turkey Tail can stimulate immune function in women with breast cancer and improve recovery from radiation. “Mushrooms produce strong antibiotics,” Stamets says, pointing out that penicillin and statins originated from fungi. He was the first to discover that a rare North American mushroom, Agarikon, protects against smallpox and related viruses, even attracting the interest of the government’s BioShield program. His supplement company, Host Defense, markets capsules of reishi, lion’s mane and other fungi to support immunity.

But Stamets’s vision goes beyond medicine. “Mycelium is the Earth’s natural internet,” Stamets likes to say, referring to the vast underground networks through which fungi exchange nutrients with plants. He believes harnessing that intelligence could help restore damaged ecosystems. On his 40-acre farm, he has experimented with fungal filters that purify farm runoff. 

Indeed, Stamets is a pioneer of mycoremediation, the use of fungi to clean up toxins. In the late 1990s, on a polluted lot in Bellingham, Washington, he seeded oil-soaked soil with Oyster mushroom spores. Within weeks, the once-black, stinking earth sprouted mushrooms and laboratory tests showed 95 to 99 percent reductions in petroleum hydrocarbons. “The pile no longer stank. Five weeks later, plants began to grow on the mushroom-inoculated pile: The mushrooms had attracted insects, who had laid their eggs in the fruits. When those eggs had hatched, the larvae had attracted birds, whose feces had brought plant seeds. Our mushroom-treated pile was the only one to flourish and rebound as an oasis of life,” Stamets explained. Other experiments have shown that mycelium can filter bacteria and heavy metals from polluted water.

Stamets has also patented fungal strains that kill termites and carpenter ants by infecting them with spores — offering an alternative to toxic pesticides. “We need to enlist fungi to help us, rather than fighting them,” he told Scientific American.

His ideas have inspired entrepreneurs. Designers have built furniture, surfboards, even bricks from fungal composites, and many of them cite Stamets’s 2005 Mycelium Running book as their bible.

Stamets’s blend of science, storytelling and showmanship has made him a star well beyond academic circles. He has given multiple TED talks with millions of views. He holds an honorary doctorate from the National University of Natural Medicine and nine patents on fungal applications. In 2014 he received the Bioneers Award for environmental innovation.

And in pop culture he received the highest honor there is — writers for the Star Trek: Discovery series called him for help with a story plot and honored him by naming the fictional “astromycologist” who navigates a spaceship via a universe-spanning mycelial network Lieutenant Paul Stamets. The real Stamets, a lifelong Star Trek fan, happily agreed. Long before that, he had built his cabin in British Columbia as a homage to the Starship Enterprise.

Not all scientists share Stamets’s enthusiasm. Critics argue that some of his claims are overstated or rest on small pilot studies rather than peer-reviewed, large-scale trials. There’s potential, but we need rigorous science, oncologists often caution. Even Stamets acknowledges the need for more data. “We’re still very much in kindergarten when it comes to understanding how to co-create a sustainable future for all beings — and all beings are necessary to make that future possible,” he says in the documentary Fantastic Fungi.

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Yet his influence is undeniable. Psychedelic therapy trials at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere are bringing psilocybin — the active compound in magic mushrooms — into mainstream medicine for depression, PTSD and addiction. Mushroom-based supplements are now a billion-dollar industry. Environmental scientists are increasingly studying fungi’s role in carbon cycling and soil health.

For Stamets, the message is urgent. He often repeats: “Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet.” If we pay attention, he believes, they may help us survive. “Through the genius of evolution, the Earth has selected fungal networks as a governing force managing ecosystems,” he writes in his book Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms.

For someone once too shy to lift his eyes from the ground, Stamets has become a remarkably visible spokesman for life on the forest floor. Whether through cancer therapies, green materials, or the fertile imaginations of science fiction, his vision has spread like mycelium itself — quietly, steadily and with astonishing reach.