With head-scratching among consumers about the sources of medicinal mushroom products, a reliable definition of a mushroom seems useful. Clarity is important because many of these “medicinals” come from mycelia instead of mushrooms and their chemical composition can be quite different. Here is my two-part definition. Mushrooms are the fungal equivalent of the fruits produced by plants. They release microscopic spores rather than seeds. We often refer to mushrooms as fruit bodies. Mushrooms are the reproductive organs of fungi. Their spores germinate to form feeding colonies called mycelia that grow as networks of branching filaments called hyphae. Mushrooms develop from mature mycelia to complete the fungal life cycle.
Money's Laws
“What I have done . . . is to make a constructive contribution to the global conversation of science and to gain some measure of insight into that great mystery, the origin of life . . . The way of science is for the best of our achievements to endure in substance but lose their individuality, like raindrops falling into a pond. So let it be.” Frank Harold (2016) Click here for the tribute in full
A screenplay by Matthew R. Riffle and Zackary D. Hill based on my 2017 novel, The Mycologist: The Diary of Bartholomew Leach, Professor of Natural History , was an official selection at the 2024 Ink & Cinema Adapted Story Showcase: https://www.inkandcinema.com/blogs/showcases/adapted-story-showcase Click here for brief excerpt from the novel
Hydras and the Roots of Depression
With news of R.F.K. Junior’s encounter with a parasitic worm, I invite you to sing along with me to the tune of “My Favorite Things”: Roundworms in most guts and hookworms in plenty Segmented tapeworms that make you feel empty Many amoebas and pinworms like strings These were a few of our nightmarish things. (From “Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines,” page 111)
Species perform life cycles by transmitting distinctive collections of genes from one generation to the next. Individuals contribute to this process if they serve as biological parents, but there is no cycle for each of them, each human being, just a beginning and an end. Cells behaving as amoebas are conductors for the whole journey, sculpting the developing fetus, protecting the body from bacterial and fungal infection, repairing wounds, and removing worn out cells. Amoebas also destroy cancer cells until they turn cancerous themselves, spread tumors across the body, and extinguish one in six of us. All of these amoeboid human cells dig deep into the billion-year-old instructions in their genomes to activate the machinery for forming pseudopodia and flowing and feeding from place to place. From birth to death, womb to tomb, the body calls on its ancient amoeboid ancestry, just as it relies on its ciliary history to make sperm cells and the hairy cells that line the lungs and other organs. We are gigantic amalgams of the single-celled microbes that learned to crawl and swim in the mud and sunlit pools of the Precambrian.
If Kafka makes you laugh, this is for you: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/nicholas-p-money
Begin by sprinkling a generous serving of planets around a medium-sized star; stir gently and allow the mixture to cool until rain begins to fall on one of the planets; keep stirring, be patient, and wait for the arms of an amoeba to reach into the water.
In a Goldilocks mushroom, the gills are not too close, not too far apart, but just the right distance for the spores to be shot to the open midplane. The following figure from a forthcoming review article shows the reciprocal changes in gill separation and discharge distance that might have played out during mushroom evolution. (Too esoteric for a blog post? Yes.)