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I played Super Mario Bros. religiously as a kid. When the movie came out, I knew I had to buy it. With Dennis Hopper as King Koopa and John Leguizamo as Luigi, it was destined to be an instant classic.
In the movie, the evil Koopa imprisons the benevolent king of Mario World by devolving him into fungus. The mushrooms are alive in the film and they end up saving the day for our plumber heroes. I say, let life imitate art.
Paul Stamets is probably the most important man you have never heard of. He is trying to save the world, one crisis at a time. And he's not using Yoshi or the raccoon suit; he is just using some mushrooms.
Fungus itself has a much richer history on this planet than humans. It was the first thing out of the primordial ocean soup o' life, well before plants and animals. Researchers have found evidence of mushroom use that dates back thousands of years before Christ. The experiences that early humans and their shamans had with mushrooms all seriously influenced modern-day society. Language, religion and our society came from early ancestors. We needed tree fungus to keep the fire on our nomadic hunts and tree fungus could stay lit for days. Mushrooms were a source of both food and medicine.
Our modern medicine and the fact that life today is far longer and better than just 100 years ago is a direct result of the magic of mushrooms. Penicillin is derived from mold. Mold is fungus. See where this is going?
Stamets is taking the uses of mushrooms to never-before-seen heights. Stocky, spectacled and, like all great men, bearded, he is using fungus from the old growth Northwest Forests. What he has done with this simple fungus is truly amazing.
Modern farming can produce all types of ecosystem damage. Run-off and bacteria such as E. coli are nasty by-products of our agricultural industry.
By wrapping his mycelia fungi in burlap "earth sacks" of storm debris and placing them at the right point, Stamets was able to cut down the amount of E. coli form bacteria by 10,000 percent in just 48 hours.
That is just the beginning.
Using a nearly extinct fungus, Stamets has worked with the U.S. Department of Defense to develop treatments for the chicken pox virus.
His mushrooms were found to be in the highest level of classification for successful treatment. Intrigued, he went on to test his fungus against the flu viruses. His fungus wiped the floor with the current pharmaceutical treatments. Because the fungus used came from the Old Growth Forest, Stamets argues we need to protect them as a matter of national defense. Tree-hugging just became a whole lot more patriotic.
No problem is too small for Stamets. Plagued by carpenter ants, he developed a non-spore-producing form of fungus that the ants ate right up and trekked right to their queen. Within two weeks the little buggers were gone. And unlike extermination companies who have spent millions trying to outsmart these critters, Stamets did it with some free mushrooms. The mushrooms stay as a deterrent towards future insects nearly forever.
You know those pesticides that everyone says are really bad for humans and our planet? They are. And some stocky, spectacled great man with a beard has developed a fungus that kills the pests without the 'cides. And he has a patent. Actually, he has quite a few.
He is currently working on ways to develop fungal sugars into fuel. And in his spare time, he works on very promising research into the treatments for HIV and cancer involving his magic mushrooms.
You can see online interviews and presentations by Stamets, just by searching his name on Google. If the concept of fungi saving the world is interesting to you, then check out his book Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms can Help Save the World.
Thank whomever you will - God, Allah, Buddha or Tony Danza - that we have a human like him on this tiny little rock.
What did you do with yourself today? I heard Stamets just saved the world.
Again.
O'Connor is a junior
studying political science.
