Sublime

The reason rapamycin has so many diverse applications is thanks to a property that Sehgal had observed, but never explored, which is that it tends to slow down the process of cellular growth and division.

When the Resolving Imager had just been developed, scanning such a huge quantity of cross sections generated powerful radiation that was fatal to any life being scanned, but successive improvements had brought the radiation below the danger line, and a large number of tests had demonstrated that so long as filming was kept below a set length of tim

skin. It is not the biology of these organisms that unites them, but their function in our lives—or our goal of trying to keep them on the outside of our bodies and not the inside.

Pister collected all the Owens pupfish left at Fish Slough, with the intention of moving them to a nearby spring. They fit into two buckets. “I distinctly remember being scared to death,” he would later write. “I had walked perhaps fifty yards when I realized that I literally held within my hands the existence of an entire vertebrate species.” Pist

But while Stamets is one of the country’s most respected mycologists, he works entirely outside the academy, has no graduate degree, funds most of his own research,fn4 and holds views of the role of fungi in nature that are well outside the scientific mainstream and that, he will gladly tell you, owe to insights granted to him by the mushrooms them