A paen to Paul Stamets

Stamets didn't get serious about mushrooms until he was 18, when he ingested psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. Hallucinating alone in the Ohio countryside, he got caught in a summer thunderstorm and climbed a tree for shelter. Waiting out the storm, Stamets examined his life. "I asked myself, 'Well Paul, why do you stutter so much?' So I repeated, 'Stop stuttering now,' over and over again, hundreds of times. The next morning, someone asked, 'Hi Paul, how are you?' I looked him right in the eye and said, 'I'm fine, how are you?' I didn't even stutter. That was when I realized mushrooms were really important to me."

Not long after his first trip, Stamets enrolled in college but dropped out to work as a logger. He eventually graduated from Olympia's Evergreen State College, whose unofficial motto, Omnia Extares, roughly translates as "Let it all hang out." While studying biology and electron microscopy, he pioneered research on psilocybin, discovering four new species and writing a definitive field guide. Unable to afford grad school, Stamets started Fungi Perfecti and published The Mushroom Cultivator, which remains a classic within the subculture of mushroom enthusiasts. (He once spotted a copy on the bookshelf of one of the directors of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.)

Stamets began distancing himself from the magic mushroom crowd about nine years ago. "The problem with the psychedelic scene," he told me while driving near his vacation home on Cortes Island, the Grateful Dead playing on the stereo, "is that people contemplate their belly buttons and don't get anything done. I wanted to save lives and the ecosystem." Yet he still credits psilocybin with giving him a sense of purpose. Stamets, who has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, used to spend hours executing complex martial arts routines in the mountains as he tripped. "I had these visions of myself as a mycological warrior in defense of the planet."

The article is deeply flawed by there are some interesting factoids in it that might amuse you: "even though the animal kingdom branched off from the fungi kingdom around 650 million years ago, humans and fungi still have nearly half of their DNA in common and are susceptible to many of the same infections. (Referring to fungi as "our ancestors" is one of the many zingers that Stamets likes to feed audiences.)"

"Paul Stamets is a modern example of the amateur scientist from the 17th and 18th century who made wonderful contributions with only their native curiosity and keen sense of observation," explains Eric Rasmussen, a former Navy physician and researcher for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation, who now heads INSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters), a Google-funded nonprofit that develops tech-nology to control disease outbreaks. "He's listened to in a lot of unexpected corners." In 1997, Battelle, a nonprofit R&D lab and a major Defense Department contractor, asked to screen more than two dozen strains of Stamets' fungi. A few years later, it sent him back a classified report revealing the mushrooms to be highly effective in breaking down the neurotoxin VX, the illegal chemical weapon. Soon afterward, DARPA invited Stamets to one of its brainstorming sessions.

He's a geek, like some of those discussed here recently who obsessively pursue some interest or another while working outside the yakity-yak establishment.

. . . for all the acclaim, Stamets is still an outsider without a PhD or an academic or institutional sponsor. That has made it hard for his work to be taken seriously in some circles—"We are just weird enough that I think we frighten people," he says—but it's an identity that he ultimately relishes. His inherently positive message—that we can tap a renewable natural resource to solve an array of environmental and medical challenges—has inspired a broad set of followers. Stamets leads workshops on "liberation mycology" and delivered the plenary address at last year's national botany conference. In February 2008, he held forth at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference, the annual conclave of deep thinkers and tech gurus in California. Afterward, Google's founders "ambushed" him with an invitation to their exclusive summer think tank . . .

I imagine that there are such geeks working now that won't be heard of much for another few decades. I imagine that the improvement in information and communication technologies will help more such geeks be productive and perhaps better known at an earlier point in their lives.