By KIM BELLARD
I see two contradictory but related visions of the future. The first is when journalist David Wallace-Wells said we could be in the “golden age of medicine,” with CRISPR and mRNA revolutionizing drug development. The second is HBO’s dystopian hit “The last of us,“in which a fungal infection has turned much of the world’s population into zombie-like creatures.
The conflict is clear but the connection not so much. Mr. Wallace-Wells never mentions fungi in his article, but if we’re going to have a golden age of medicine, or if we want to avoid a global fungal epidemic, we better pay more attention to mycology – that is, to the study of fungi.
We don’t need”The last of us” to worry about fungal outbreaks. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Severe fungal diseases used to be an abnormal phenomenon. Now it’s a threat to millions of vulnerable Americans, and treatments have lost effectiveness as fungal pathogens develop resistance to standard drugs.
“It’s going to get worse,” warns Dr. Tom Chiller, chief of the fungal diseases branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. WSJ.
A new study discovered that a common but extremely drug-resistant type of fungus – Aspergillus fumigatus – has been found even in a very remote and sparsely populated part of China. Professor Jianping Xu, one of the authors, pointed out“This fungus is very ubiquitous — it’s around us all the time. We all inhale hundreds of spores of this species every day.
We shouldn’t be surprised, because fungi tend to be spread by spores. In fact, according to the fascinating study by Merlin Sheldrake Tangled Life: How Mushrooms Create Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures mushroom spores are the largest source of living particles in the air. They are also in the ground, in the water and in us. They are everywhere.
It sounds scary, but without mushrooms, not only would we not be alive, but we would never have evolved.
Fungi allowed sea plants to colonize land, which led to sea creatures moving ashore, which eventually led to us, among other species. Dr. Sheldrake notes that every plant growing in natural conditions is accompanied by fungi. They help break down minerals in the soil for plants, among other things.
Without them, we are nothing.
And this part about taking care of animal brains, like in The last of us, is, in fact, true. For example, they are known to invade the brains of ants and mice, causing them to exhibit unusual behavior that kills the animal but causes the fungus to spread, which is their goal. As for influencing human behavior, the answer seems to be be somewhere between “maybe” and “probably”. If you are a fan of magic mushrooms, then the answer is “yes”.
In an interview with The New York Times, explains Dr Sheldrake: “Mycelium (networks of fungal threads) is an ecological connective tissue and reminds us that all forms of life, including humans, are linked by bubbling webs of relationships, some visible and others less.” We can ignore them, we can try to fight them, but failing to recognize how we fit into these networks is at our peril.
“Mushrooms are not thought through enough,” said Dr. Peter Pappas, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. said WSJ. Dr Andrej Spec, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Washington, agreed, adding: “In medicine, mushrooms are an afterthought. We need a paradigm shift.
In effect. As WSJ went on to say:
Many medical schools are not training aspiring doctors enough to identify and treat fungal diseases, infectious disease experts have said. Some schools devote a few hours to the subject, these experts said. “Most fungal diseases are taught in medical school as rare or unusual or even regional, but we see them daily,” said Dr. George R. Thompson, an infectious disease specialist at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. . .
I’m glad we at least realize the problems fungus can cause to our health, but I’m afraid we’re going down the same path we took with bacteria. We discovered they could harm us, then we discovered we could kill them, developing a range of antibacterials capable of annihilating them on a large scale, and then we continued to blithely abuse them. Too late, we finally realized that, duh, bacteria become resistant to it over time, and even worse, we need certain bacteria.
We’re just beginning to recognize the importance our microbiome plays in our health, but we haven’t significantly changed our medical training or our practice of medicine to recognize that role. We are even further behind when it comes to the mycobiome. If we barely taught how to identify and treat fungal diseases in medical school, imagine how far behind we are in how to use our fungal companions to boost our health.
The immunologist Barney Graham, central figure in the development of mRNA vaccines, said to Mr. Wallace-Wells“It’s amazing. You can’t imagine what you are going to see in the next 30 years. The pace of advancement is in an exponential phase right now. But, I would say that if all we do is build a new line of vaccines and weapons against various microbes, I don’t expect a golden age for our health.
Mr. Sheldrake and others are considering using, not killing, mushrooms. They can be used, for example, to create antivirals, break down pollutants, create food, build materials (mycofabrication), and even, like Mr. Sheldrake described in a new article, to help us fight climate change through carbon sequestration. They are not our enemies. They were there before us, and they will be here long after us.
As Dr. Pappas said, we need a paradigm shift.
It is incredible that we have deciphered our genetic code, and even more that we are now able to modify it. It’s amazing how we can use imagery to observe our bodies – and even our brains – functioning in real time, and can use those results to identify problems. It’s exciting to be able to use DNA fragments to detect cancers and other diseases at an early stage. But we still don’t know what a “healthy” microbiome is and how it matters to us, let alone how our mycobiome interacts with it and with “us.”
The fact is that our concept of “us” is an illusion. We are a network of our own DNA, cells and processes, and all the other organisms that co-exist with us. Our health is a network effect; we are only healthy when this network is in balance.
We cannot reach a golden age of medicine and biomedical innovation without mushrooms.
Kim is a former e-marketing executive at Big Blues, editor of the late and lamented Tincture.ioand now a regular THCB contributor.
