HEFFNER: I am Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, Keith Seifert.

He's author of the book, The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi: Exploring the Microscopic World in our Forest Homes and Bodies.

A pleasure to host you today, sir.

SEIFERT: It's a pleasure to be here with you, Alex.

Thanks for the invitation.

HEFFNER: What was the impetus that drove you to author this book and body of research that is included in this book?

SEIFERT: Well, there's a few things.

I'd spend my career studying fungi, and so many people couldn't believe that I was being paid to do that.

They had no idea.

So I'd explain to them about invasive species or trade embargoes or antibiotics or mycotoxins or symbiosis, and you could see a flickering of understanding and a realization that these things are important.

And there's so much interest nowadays in biodiversity in the political and scientific front.

But micros seem to get left out of the conversation most of the time.

And even people who are interested in fungi focus on mushrooms, the larger ones, and or else they focus on the more negative aspects of fungi.

And this book is about microscopic fungi and about their effects on human life, both the positive and the negative ones.

Most fungi are microscopic, and they have large impacts on our forests, agriculture, food, our bodies, sometimes, and in our homes.

So I thought it would be useful to fill in these gaps in our understanding of nature and humans part in it.

HEFFNER: What are the different categories of the microscopic fungi?

SEIFERT: Well, in terms of classification, that's probably the most boring topic you can imagine.

But people tend to think about yeasts may not realize that they're fungi, but yeast or fungi, there are molds that people are mostly familiar with growing on their food, or maybe they see them growing around in their house.

And then there's a lot of fungi that are totally hidden that are inside the plants or rotting wood or down in the soil, and we're not very aware of them, but their impacts can be quite dramatic.

HEFFNER: Well, I asked you the most uninteresting part of the classification or categorization.

So tell me, in writing this book, what was the most interesting part that you feel like you're revealing to both a scientific cohort of your peers and the lay person that you can reveal to our listeners and viewers today?

SEIFERT: I think, when I started it off, as I said, I wanted to kind, kind of focus as much as I could on the positive part.

Not totally overlooking the negative part, but trying to find a balance.

And the way I found to do that seemed interesting to me, and I learned a lot in doing it, was by looking at symbiosis, which is the way that different organisms live together and try to portray the breadth of the symbiosis that occurs with the fungal kingdom.

And it turns out that fungi are really very talented symbionts, and that goes all the way from being parasites to being what are called mutual symbionts.

So it's sort of best friends kind of relationship between a fungus or anything and anything else.

So the lichen are a well-known example.

And in prior to writing this book, the, the fungi involved with tree roots started to get a lot of attention in the scientific press as well.

And that's another kind of mutualistic symbiosis.

HEFFNER: And what about their relevance to modern society?

The forward of your book is written by another Open Mind guest, Rob Dunn who wrote a similar book about the microscopic elements in our everyday homes that might thrill us or scare us to death.

But what are the linkages to both negative and constructive impact that fungi are capable of having in our day-to-day lives?

SEIFERT: I think most people are aware of the story of penicillin and that it came from a mold.

So that's just one of the antibiotics that really changed human lifespans really.

I added 15 years to human lifespans since the Second World War.

And there's other, not really antibiotics, but they're chemicals that come from fungi.

I have one in my blood right now, which is called statin.

Statins are fungal, or were fungal metabolites.

They're now mostly made chemically, but in another drug called cyclosporine that comes from one of the zombie fungi actually, and that's what enables tissue transplants.

It stops rejection of foreign organs when they're transplanted into bodies.

There's also our food, and we know that most people are aware that they get molds on their food, but there's a lot of molds that are part of food fermentation and yeast are part of it as well.

So all alcoholic beverages are, are fungal.

Several cheeses have fungi as kind of the flavor component.

There's a lot of Oriental fermented foods like tempe and soy sauce, and it just goes on and on.

And more and more as our culture sort starts to embrace the traditional foods from other cultures, we are running into fungal foods that we haven't really encountered before.

HEFFNER: Is this a focus of your fellow scientists in the profession?

Do you feel like this is a more marginal component of the scientific process today?

Or do you think that the folks who are working on new medicines or who are investigating environmental disasters or engaged in the scientific process today.

Do you think that the kingdom that you say is hidden is something that is being unearthed and investigated and studied, or must there be a movement to bring this to the fore in a way that it's being neglected in terms of its relevance related to other scientific areas of study?

SEIFERT: I would say it's a work in progress, and the world is always changing anyway.

We don't expect things to be stable and stuck in, in one spot.

So I spent most of my career working with people who were not mycologists.

I worked with chemists, I worked with plant breeders people who worked on nutrition, that kind of thing.

So I spent my whole career and I didn't really have to market the fungi to these people.

They knew that that fungi were part, or the fungal metabolites were part of what they were trying to the problems that they were trying to solve or the opportunities they were trying to develop.

And so I didn't need to do that.

But at the same time, I think that the whole concept of micro biomes, which Rob Dunn talks about in his book, and Ed Yong talks about in I am Multitudes a lot.

This whole concept has really changed how we look at biology and whole idea of what an individual organism is.

And I think in in particular in agriculture we have not really paid attention to all of these other beneficial organisms that are associated with the crops.

We've been more focused on the detrimental ones, and we have an automatic reaction that when we see a fungus involved with the crop, that it must be harming it in some way.

And that's not really necessarily true.

HEFFNER: You have been involved in something called fungal DNA barcoding.

What is that?

SEIFERT: That's a way of identifying a fungus or any organism by using a DNA sequence.

So when I went to school, when we wanted to identify a fungus, we had to make a microscopic slide.

We went through what was called a dichotomous key, which is kind of you make a decision and then you go into the next paragraph and make another decision, and you work through according to what you've seen with the microscope or with your eyes.

And that's the kind of expertise that I have actually.

But it's a relatively rare expertise, and it's complicated.

You have to carry a lot of knowledge with you to, in order to go through that process.

So using a DNA sake, which is much simpler, there's thousands of times more technical people who can sequence a DNA strand.

And then there's a universal database gen bank in the United States as part of that, the National Institute of Health, National Institutes of Health database.

Anybody in a sense can identify anything using a DNA sequence that's oversimplifying it.

But it definitely has liberated a lot of people who want to work with fungi and other microorganisms to know what they're working with.

They don't really need to have a taxonomic expertise like expert like myself to do that anymore.

HEFFNER: This is from your book.

“I am an unashamed fungal partisan.

We are living in an era of declining biological diversity at the same time as we are becoming aware of an unexpectedly vast interconnectivity among all life in this book, fungi are both the heroes and the villains.

Humans are just the supporting cast.

” And it's pointed out that there are anticipated to be between one and a half and 15 million fungal species.

And my question to you is, is it fair to say, Keith, that we have not done sufficient digging?

I said before unearthing to know yet if one of these could be capable of a new revolutionary medicine.

There is always this obsession with space travel and particles from the moon or other planets that might be integral to solving a public health or genetic problem.

But to my knowledge, based on what you're saying, there are many fungi that have not yet been named or identified, or whose impacts are still unknown.

SEIFERT: That's true.

And I think DNA technology has allowed us to detect these fungi in the environment.

So we know that they're there because we can see their DNA, but we don't know what they look like.

We don't know necessarily what their capacities are encompassed in their genomes.

The pharmaceutical industry, especially in the United States, up until about the year 2000, really did have a very active bioprospecting program going looking for new medicines.

And then it was kind of downsized when the early kinds of Artificial Intelligence and advances in synthetic chemistry allowed them to devise imaginary chemical compounds and then make them to that they figured would have a certain activity.

Now, genomics is pulling us back in the other direction where we're starting to realize that there's all these genes out there that in fungi and other microbes that we don't actually know what they're doing.

And, and so, but we can infer what they're doing based on their structure sometimes.

So the other thing that's changing though, is that the idea of the magic bullet, everybody still has that fantasy, but everyone I think is starting to realize that it is a fantasy.

Now, the magic bullets, we probably found them.

And so now it's going to be harder.

It's going to be a lot of effort for smaller rewards.

And one of the things that's interesting, and towards the end of the book, I talk about what I call microentrepreneurs, and these are smaller companies, small businesses that take on a small problem and try to solve it either with fungi or with something else.

And everyone's familiar, probably with the rise of microbreweries, that's kind of an example of that.

And these companies, though, they don't need to make $10 billion to make it all worthwhile.

They can around and spend a few hundred thousand dollars and maybe come up with something.

So it has kind of mobilized this creativity of science and taking it away from the mar large corporations, in my view.

HEFFNER: That's really fascinating, Keith, to hear that recent history of AI supplanting fungi in the search for new fungi that had not been revealed to the public or to the scientific community that then could assess their viability.

But I wonder if our obsession and, frankly my obsession too with the magic or golden bullet, silver bullet idea derived from penicillin, derived from the fact that we really, correct me if you think this is misplaced but that there was a drug that for a good chunk of recent history has been a savior for so many these, strep throat and a whole class of illnesses that I guess that our orientation had been derived from that successful experiment.

SEIFERT: Yeah, that story is always told in a certain way, too, and that it was an accidental discovery and that there was this flash of genius in Alexander Fleming that allowed him to see this.

But actually, I think it was Pasteur that was one of the people who said that chance favors the prepared mind.

And there's no question that that Fleming's history, his life led him to that moment.

And so it wasn't really an accident, but having said that, it's certainly true that be because that story is often told, I've told it many times myself in seminars, that it does create that kind of arc archetype that people expect, that kind of thing to happen.

The reality of my career, and I think of most scientists is that the time of the isolated genius is more or less passed.

It's really now collaborative multidisciplinary teams.

That's not to say that these kind of brilliant one-off ideas aren't useful.

We really need lots of ideas, right?

The ideas are kind of like genes.

The good ones survive and the bad ones fade away.

So the more ideas we have, the better.

And if some of them are magic bullets, I don't think anyone will be turning them down.

HEFFNER: Were you suggesting that there was the reverting back to the investigative mind and exploration of fungi?

Because you, as I said, I found it interesting that you mentioned the advent of AI and artificial medicines chemically made as opposed to bodies of life from plants or fungi.

But you seem to be suggesting that there's a maybe a new revisiting of the fungi approach.

SEIFERT: We used to, 20 years ago, we didn't talk about Artificial Intelligence.

We talked about expert systems.

So people were using mostly databases, but also coding that would connect different databases into a way that that would simulate the behavior and the knowledge of an expert.

So these advances that I talked about with chem advances, if you want to call them that with chemically designed drugs came out of that kind of milieu.

People felt that they had a handle on how enzymes and how chemicals interacted with each other through their active sites, and they modeled that, and then, and so they built these systems to do that.

And that's quite different, I think, than the Artificial Intelligence that we think of nowadays in the public discussion with all of the concern about Chat GPT and the others where they are trying to mimic the thought process.

That's a bit different than applying a knowledge base to a problem, I think.

HEFFNER: That's fair.

And, and also I think what your book compellingly does, and then it's really a tour de force inside the body, and you speak to the public or the reader as a fungi at certain points, and it's very compelling.

I suggest everybody take, take a look and, and try at least one chapter of the Hidden Kingdom of Fungi.

The reality you pointed out from the outset, Keith, is that people's association with this field is mushrooms.

It's mushrooms that are foraged, it's mushrooms that people get a high on, it's mushrooms that are served in your salad.

You wanted to complex, make more nuanced and complex the narrative around this, but for those who associate fungi singularly with mushrooms or the habitat of mushrooms, what do you want to share with those people about either the relevance of mushrooms themselves or the more multi-dimensional existence of fungi?

SEIFERT: I think mushrooms are a great gateway into becoming aware of the fungal kingdom.

And a lot of the events that I've been to as a result of the book have been with mushroom people.

And when you go to a mushroom club, there's always people who are interested in the tiny things.

And some of them are interested in the really tiny things, and they're really happy to see somebody like me who's kind of way off into the microscopic spectrum from their point of view.

But that's one thing I would definitely say to your viewers if you think that you have an interest in the fungi by all means go out and find your local mycological club because there's a list of them on the website of the NAMA, North American Mycological Association.

There's a great one in New York.

There's a fantastic one in San Francisco.

They're all over the United States.

A little less common in Canada, but we still have some good ones there.

And that way you'll find people who share that interest.

But you'll find people have enormous amount of in interest and knowledge in this subject.

And from there, you can go the directions you want to go.

And if it takes you in the smaller realm, that's good for me.

HEFFNER: What have we learned about the geographic proximity to this kingdom on our respective continents?

You're zooming in from Canada.

We're both in North America and I'm in the U.S., but what did you discover in the process of writing about this subject about the origin of the kingdom across the vast landscape of planet earth?

SEIFERT: Well, I have a hobby interest in geology and plate tectonics and stuff.

And there's definitely a lot of ancient history in the fungal kingdom.

But what it means to us now.

There's a lot of concern about invasive species in general.

I mean we've all just lived through an invasive species event.

We may not think of it that way, but that's what it was.

And that was just a dramatic example of something that happens all the time and has always happened.

HEFFNER: You're referring to the pandemic.

SEIFERT: I'm referring to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yeah.

But there's a word “pangeafication, ” which is that's a very cute kind of word, but the idea is that by traveling so much and by trading commodities between continents so much that essentially the earth is the becoming one great landmass again, as far as the microbes are concerned.

And I don't think we can really stop that.

We might be able to slow it down.

And I think that's really what everybody hopes that's involved in regulation is just to slow it down as much as we can in Canada and the United States.

Now we have two major fungal invasive diseases going on.

One is the bat white nose syndrome, and the other is the amphibian apocalypse as Elizabeth Colbert has called it, which has led to the extinction of what I think is about a hundred species of frogs, totes and salamanders around the world.

But there's a lot of concern about these, and the frog one is spread because of our own activities.

That seems pretty clear.

The bat one is a little more obscure why, how it got here from Europe.

HEFFNER: When you think of the promise and the peril of the fungal kingdom in beyond 2023 what, what is the biggest threat of fungal disease?

Not that it would be a pandemic, but there are those who prophesize that it would be a pandemic.

And what is the greatest hope in curing disease or being a natural resource of some kind?

SEIFERT: While there are still fungal human fungal diseases of patients with AIDS.

There's a big concern there.

There's also a lot of fungal diseases that are associated with hospitals.

So they are hospital-acquired diseases.

And so those are problems that need to be dealt with but I don't really think of them as being anything like a pandemic or epidemic.

These are things that are there and we need to cope with them.

I think the biggest question mark with fungi right now relates to climate change because fungi are so intimately associated with plants that if we want to sequester carbon in plants, we really need to understand the fungal component of that system.

So they both help plants capture carbon just by being part of the whole system of a plant.

But then when the plant dies, they release carbon.

And so there's this balance between growth and decay and fungi are involved with both of them.

And there are some researchers and research networks that are looking into that and trying to flesh out the balance sheet there.

But I do think that's a big question globally.

HEFFNER: Keith, thank you for your insight and your time today, and for all those interested in the Hidden Kingdom of Fungi do checkout the book exploring the microscopic world in our forest homes and bodies.

Appreciate your perspective and scholarship.

Keith, thank you for your time today.

SEIFERT: Thanks, Alex.

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