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

by Merlin Sheldrake

Penicillin, a compound that could defend fungi from bacterial infection, turned out to defend humans as well. This is not unusual: although fungi have long been lumped together with plants, they are actually more closely related to animals – an example of the kind of category mistake researchers regularly make in their struggle to understand fungal lives.

The story of penicillin has some great twists and turns. After penicillin had been purified but before it had become widely available news circulated in the medical community about its remarkable curative powers. Crude ‘kitchen sink’ extracts were made by doctors and in some cases pads made of the living mould were applied to wounds directly, allowing the fungus to fight it out with the bacteria in real time, in situ. I’ve grown pads from penicillin moulds to see what it would be like to dress a wound with them although I never had an infection to treat. I toyed with the idea of giving myself two identical wounds, one on each leg, infecting them, and treating one with mould and leaving the other untreated to see which healed faster. I came to the conclusion that intentionally creating festering sores was perhaps a little reckless and shelved the experiment, although I’m still curious about what would happen.