Stamets struck me as equal parts high school biology teacher, mystic environmentalist, and genuine innovator. He’s that special caliber of pioneering scientist capable of stretching the field in almost any direction, often with new and unexpected results. Consequently, Stamets has elevated mycology as a potent tool in tackling major issues that face our modern, natural world.

Recent disasters involving nuclear radiation, such as the Fukushima Daiichi plant explosion in Japan, and crude oil spills, like BP’s Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, are reminders of the need for innovative environmental cleanup methods. Can you discuss your work with mycoremediation as a tool for tackling environmental disasters?
Mycoremediation is the production of enzymes, extra-cellular compounds, which digest and decompose toxins and turn them into a food source. In the case of oil spills, in the evidence we’ve scene thus far, the mycelium is able to digest petroleum using the same enzymes they have evolved to breakdown lignin and cellulose, the two structural components of plants. When we grow oyster mushroom mycelium on petroleum-saturated soil, we see that the mycelium breaks down the oil and remanufactures those hydrocarbons into fungal carbohydrates, into sugars. It’s astonishing that these fungi have an appetite for petroleum.

In terms of radioactivity, the melanin-producing fungi bind up the radioactive elements into non-cellular forms. Geoffrey Gadd, in the UK, discovered that depleted uranium could be bound up by these melanized fungi in the least toxic form found in nature. Video feeds at the Chernobyl site revealed prolific fungi growing all over the cement walls and containment vessels. Under those adverse conditions, no one thought that life could survive. However, subsequent research found that these fungi utilize radioactivity in a fashion analogous to plants’ utilization of sunlight for cellular metabolism.

Once mushrooms appear in a toxic waste site, you can culture them and capture that genetic strain, selecting the strains that have a greater ability to digest that toxic waste—and so, you have increasing target specificity. In a matter of a few weeks or months, you can develop super strains that are tuned specifically to the toxins you want to target. Fungi are the gateway species. Once they break down toxins that prevent other life forms from growing, there is a proliferation of biological communities. They have a prefect combination of talents and there is no shortage of toxic waste sites around the world.

Can you discuss the idea of ‘plant intelligence’ in relation to mycelium networks?
We have a curious linguistic prejudice of thinking that humans are the only intelligent organisms on this planet. I believe that mycelium is a neurological network and there is a lot of good evidence to support this now. The most fun example being the slime mold experiment used to redesign the Tokyo railway system. In the experiment, Tokyo was represented by a large nutrition point Petri dish with an oat flake, while satellite cities around Tokyo were represented with smaller oat flakes in proportion to their population.  When the slime mold grew out, it randomly connected all those dots, creating many side branches. Within 24 hours, all non-essential side branches were shut down by the mother mycelium. It then channeled its cellular filaments to create the most efficient connection distances possible—and in doing so, redesigned the Tokyo railway system in a more efficient fashion than is in use today. When they did the mathematical analysis, it approached the optimum of engineering design.

In similar experiments, researchers allowed slime mold to find the shortest path through a maze and discovered that when transferred to new mazes, the slime mold was able to navigate through them with a memory of its previous experience and find the shortest distance possible out of the maze without having to randomly go through dead ends. The remarkable thing about mycelium is that when there is a success, there is a surge of growth and this efficiency of growth becomes part of the innate intelligence of the mycelial network. It doesn’t have to experiment from scratch because it has a memory.

You have compared mycelial networks to computing networks and to the internet. Can you elaborate on this connection?
Before “Avatar” came out, I wrote to Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google with a concept of a myco-computer, an interface system that can lock into the natural mycelial ‘internet’ in the ground, where mosaics of overlapping filaments are in constant bio-molecular communication via bacteria. As an interface organism, mycelium selects bacteria, which prevent parasites, increasing the sustainability of these organisms in the ecosystem through a cellular alliance. We know now that they are communicating, that there is an electron flow going between these organisms, even though we do not fully understand the language.

How wonderful would it be to develop this god-like consciousness where people can walk out into nature and be in contact with various biological communities through interface technologies, such as contact lens-sized supercomputers equipped with wireless communication? This technology could offer a seamless form of augmented reality, navigated by focusing and directing the eye and allowing us to know, for example, that an E. coli population is developing because the competitive bacteria that kept it in check has weakened. There is the possibility of a much deeper understanding of these complex communities and the potential to have real-time knowledge of potential biological stresses or disasters forming.

I believe in the intelligence of nature. I believe we have to go full circle in into nature, and that these interfaces are inevitable.

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