Paul Stamets
Making a commercial and patentable case for fungi as pest control, bee medicine and soil repair.
The record
- Standing
- active practice
- Based
- Fungi Perfecti
- Founded
- Fungi Perfecti, in 1980 — a family-owned company built around cultivating and applying fungi.
- Patents
- US 8,501,207, ‘Mycoattractants and mycopesticides’; US 9,399,050, controlling insects and arthropods using preconidial mycelium and extracts from entomopathogenic fungi (2016); US 9,474,776, ‘Integrative Fungal Solutions for Protecting Bees’ (2016).
- Published
- Author of six books and co-author on 28 peer-reviewed papers.
- Recognition
- Invention Ambassador for the AAAS; National Mycologist Award from the North American Mycological Association.
Standing is this studio’s placement of the work, not a ranking of the person, and it is the one line here that is a judgement rather than a cited fact.
The work
Stamets works the applied end, and the patents are the clearest evidence of it. Using entomopathogenic fungi in a pre-sporulating state so that insects will carry them home rather than avoid them is a genuine piece of invention, and so is the antiviral work on extracts fed to honeybees against colony viruses.
Mycelium Running is the book that put mycoremediation, mycofiltration and mycopesticides into the vocabulary of people who grow things. It is written as an argument that fungi are usable infrastructure — for cleaning water leaving a farm, for breaking down a contaminated site, for controlling a pest without a residue.
He is a commercial figure as well as a research one, and some of the health claims made around the wider mushroom-supplement market outrun their evidence; the patented work and the peer-reviewed papers are the part of the record that stands on its own.
Where to read them
- Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World
- Research and development — Fungi Perfecti
- MycoPesticide update — Fungi Perfecti The patent record and the state of the insect work.
Sources for this record
Corrections
This record was assembled from the sources above, and nothing in it was inferred to fill a gap. If it is about you and it is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, write and it changes.