Mushroom Man

I spent a long time considering my specialism. When I told my tutor I wanted to study fungi, she thought I was a bit mad. It’s certainly not as glamorous as marine biology, is it? Rather than scuba diving on exotic islands, I’d be poking around in mud looking at mushrooms! I suppose I felt a bit sorry for them because everyone was more interested in humans or dolphins.

Fungi play an essential role in our ecosystem, but we know so little about them. There are probably 3.8 million kinds of fungi on the planet and we’ve only discovered 10% of them. It excited me to work in a field where there was so much work to do; it still does, to be honest. They’re beautiful things, mushrooms. When you get them under a microscope they have these wonderful, delicate patterns.

The other thing I like about them is that they’re both good guys and bad guys (and fun guys, haha! Biologists love that joke). On the positive side, they taste delicious and have all kinds of medical uses. But on the negative side, so many fungi are poisonous. But I just think fungi have these fascinating personalities. All the best characters in literature are complex, neither good nor bad, and it’s the same in the natural world.

Maybe now I sound like someone who has spent too long in darkened rooms, staring at mushrooms! But to become an expert in any field you have to take pleasure in your work. I think this pleasure is what led to my nickname – the Mushroom Man. It began as a joke among my friends but when I became an author, I thought, why not use it?

My first book, The Mysteries of Mushrooms, is still my most famous, but when I read it now I see how much I didn’t know. I was only in my thirties when I wrote it. I’m proudest of my most recent book, which was a collaboration between 60 scientists, and is a survey of all the world’s fungi. It took us years to write and edit, and of course it can never really be up to date. But it’s the only work of its kind, and it’s a great feeling to have done something that no-one else ever has.

When I’m invited to speak about my books I get asked the same two questions over and over again. The first is why should people care about fungi – they’re kind of disgusting, they’re dangerous, and so on. Well, I understand that not everyone shares my passion for them, but studying mushrooms could be the key to solving climate change. There’s no more pressing environmental issue than global warming so we should take mycology (that’s the proper name for what I do) seriously.

The second question people love to ask is whether I’ve tried magic mushrooms. It’s a naughty question, really! There are 216 types of ‘magic’ mushroom, that’s to say, mushrooms that have drug-like effects. My answer is no, I haven’t tried them because they’re illegal, but it’s one more example of why I’m so attracted to fungi. And it comes from such a tiny little organism.

In this autobiography I’m going to talk a lot about these tiny little organisms, and also about my personal journey from a 16-year-old who failed his science exams to a 66- year-old biologist with a small degree of fame. Thank you for joining me – and I hope I can make you fall in love with mushrooms the way that I did.