Sublime

A few years ago, Stamets won a patent for a “mycopesticide”—a mutant mycelium from a species of Cordyceps that, after being eaten by carpenter ants, colonizes their bodies and kills them, but not before chemically inducing the ant to climb to the highest point in its environment and then bursting a mushroom from the top of its head that releases it

Like many species of fungi, Stamets has a passionate attachment to trees and wood.

the federal government’s Bioshield program asked to screen hundreds of the rare mushroom strains in Stamets’s collection and found several that showed strong activity against SARS, smallpox, herpes, and bird and swine flu. (If this strikes you as implausible, remember that penicillin is the product of a fungus.)

Paul Stamets’s Mycelium Running – How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World (2005) is an invaluable resource for regenerative culture designers.

Stamets is so deep into the world of fungi there’s frequently one perched on top of his head.

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

My impression was that the revival of legitimate university research had made Stamets more comfortable reopening this particular chapter in his life.