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. P aul 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 wi…
