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.
