Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

by Merlin Sheldrake

The researchers wondered whether, if they trained a flatworm to remember features of its environment and then cut off its head, it would retain the memory when it has grown a new head and brain. Remarkably, the answer is yes.

Indeed, the amino acids glutamate and glycine—major signaling molecules in plants, and the most common neurotransmitters in animal brains and spinal cords—are known to pass between plants and fungi at these junctions.

Not long before I arrived, Stamets had been contacted by the creative team behind the TV series Star Trek: Discovery, who wanted to know more about his work. He had agreed to brief them on the ways that fungi could be used to save worlds. Sure enough, Star Trek: Discovery, which premiered the next year, was laced with mycological themes. A new character was introduced, a brilliant astromycologist called Lieutenant Paul Stamets, who uses fungi to develop powerful technologies that can be deployed to save humanity in a fight against a series of terminal threats.

Adding a one percent extract of amadou (or Fomes) and reishi (Ganoderma, the species used to grow materials at Ecovative) to bees’ sugar water reduced deformed wing virus eighty-fold. Fomes extracts reduced levels of Lake Sinai virus nearly ninety-fold, and Ganoderma extracts reduced it forty-five-thousand-fold.

(It is an interesting distinction; by extension, Macrotermes termites and leaf-cutter ants made the transition from nature to culture tens of millions of years before humans.)

The strongest riposte to the dog-eat-dog vision of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” came from the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin in his bestselling book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, in 1902. In it, he stresses that “sociability” was as much a part of nature as the struggle for existence. Based on his interpretation of nature, he advocated a clear message: “Don’t compete!” “Practice mutual aid! That is the surest means of giving to each and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual, and moral.”