Paul Stamets (b. 1955)
American mycologist, author, and inventor — largely self-taught, and by wide agreement the person most responsible for bringing mycelium and medicinal mushrooms into mainstream scientific and public conversation over the past four decades. If you’ve heard anyone describe fungi as capable of cleaning up pollution, fighting viruses, or possibly one day helping terraform another planet, the trail almost always leads back to him.
Born July 17, 1955, in Salem, Ohio, and raised in Columbiana, Stamets attended Mercersburg Academy before earning his degree from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington (1979). He worked as a logger before turning fully to mycology, a path his brother John first opened up through trips to Mexico and Colombia in search of psilocybin mushrooms. What began as fieldwork on psychoactive species — his first book, Psilocybe Mushrooms & Their Allies(1978), came out before he’d even finished his degree — grew into a career spanning cultivation science, medicinal fungi, environmental remediation, and eventually the therapeutic and psychedelic research that had started it all in the first place.
Fungi Perfecti and the case for mycelium
Stamets founded Fungi Perfecti and its supplement arm, Host Defense Organic Mushrooms, building a commercial operation around the same organism he’s spent his career arguing the world underestimates: mycelium, the vast underground web of fungal threads that a mushroom is only the fruiting body of. His research and patents span what he calls “mycopesticides” (fungi that lure and kill insects, reducing the need for chemical pesticides), mycofiltration (using fungal networks to filter contaminants out of water), and mycoremediation — breaking down oil, pesticides, and other pollutants using the same enzymatic processes fungi use to decompose wood in the wild. He holds numerous patents across these areas.
Perhaps his most striking research thread involves agarikon (Fomitopsis officinalis), an old-growth-forest fungus historically used by Indigenous Pacific Northwest peoples, which Stamets has studied for antiviral properties against smallpox, influenza (including H1N1), and other viruses — work that grew directly out of the “6 Ways Mushrooms Can Help Save the World” framing he made famous. He’s also researched fungal extracts as a potential aid for honeybee colony health, exploring whether mycelium compounds could help bees resist the viruses linked to colony collapse.
From cultivation manuals to Fantastic Fungi
His bibliography traces the arc of the whole field: The Mushroom Cultivator (1983) and Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms (1993) remain standard references for cultivators; Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World (1996) extended his early psychoactive-species work; and Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World (2005) became the book that carried his environmental and medicinal claims to a much wider readership. He returned to his roots most recently with Psilocybin Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitats (2025). He was a central figure in and edited the companion book to the 2019 documentary Fantastic Fungi, which did more than perhaps anything else to bring his ideas — and his TED talk, “6 Ways Mushrooms Can Help Save the World” — to a mainstream audience.
His profile has become large enough that Star Trek: Discovery named a character after him: Lieutenant Commander Paul Stamets, the fictional series’ astromycologist, a nod Stamets has embraced rather than shied away from.
Recognition and role at the Church
Stamets has received the Bioneers Award (1998), the North American Mycological Association’s Award for Contributions to Amateur Mycology (2013), and the AAAS Invention Ambassador Award (2014–2015), among others. He holds an honorary doctorate from the National University of Natural Medicine.
Within the Church of the Sacred Mushroom, Stamets occupies a particular place: less a spiritual teacher in the mold of Wasson or Maria Sabina than a bridge figure, someone whose scientific credibility has done more than almost anyone else to chip away at ordinary mycophobia — the same irrational fear of fungi the Church names directly in its mission. His case that mushrooms can heal land, body, and possibly mind gives the Church’s older spiritual claims about the sacred mushroom a contemporary, evidence-facing counterpart.
Sources:
Ancient Mushroom, Modern Medicine: Paul Stamets Says Agarikon Mycelium May Be Key to Fighting Viral Pandemics — Bio-IT World available yet in this language.