Paul Stamets at TEDMED 2011

we are now rediscovering that which our ancestors long ago knew that mushrooms are deep reservoirs for very powerful medicines in the next 10 minutes I'm going to describe four mushrooms which I think are essential for human health the first mushroom I want to mention is Amadou Amadou was described by Hippocrates in 450 BC as an anti-inflammatory while Amadou is a birch polypore but has other attributes as well you can hollow this mushroom out in the center put embers of a fire inside and keep fire alive for days moreover if you boil this mushroom it delaminates into a cellular fabric and my hat is made from Amadou now another fungal friend I have here which I want to in Vale is a Garak on a gerakan is the longest living mushroom in the world it was described by deities in 65 ad as elec cerium at Langham vitam the treatment against consumption now this mushroom is a resident to the old-growth force is now thought to be extinct in Europe it grows in Northern California Oregon Washington and British Columbia this mushroom survives in the old-growth forest under extremely adverse conditions hundreds of inches of rain per year wind sleet hail baking in the Sun and yet is the longest living mushroom that we know today and may have the clicker thank you Mark so my partner and wife spent a lot of time in the old-growth forest looking for these mushrooms and to give you some idea how rare our gerakan is although we have 40 strains of a gerakan and culture after 30 years the largest library by far in the world my dear professor dr. Michael beaut discovered his first a gerakan Yule growth forest just these past few weeks after looking for mushrooms in the OL growth forests for more than 40 years so a gerakan has ante tubercular properties we have now confirmed this working with the u.s. Bioshield bio defense program under the guidance of NIH and u.s. Amrit and sometimes we have to go to great extremes to find these mushrooms this is a 700 year old Douglas fir tree our team member has sends the tree we go a hundred feet up this tree and this is the oldest Agera con that we have found so far approaching 100 years in age now how is it that this mushroom can survive under microbial attack and it's able to do so because the mycelium is this cellular architecture that is based on a network concept and we don't need to harvest the mushrooms we get a small piece of tissue and the mycelium as it grows utilizes what we know is epigenesis has the amazing ability to adapt is the host defense strategies against pathogens and using this information we've been able to develop some very powerful gateways to new medicines and these are extracellular droplets that we wash from the mycelium and I'm happy to announce that we have discovered a new class of anti microbials and antivirals called phobic top stalls after the latin name of this mushroom which is foaming topsis officinalis so powerful are these antivirals then when we do a hundred-to-one dilution we are more powerful than rip of ayran against flu viruses and herpes now mushrooms have other properties which are interesting and so this is a group of cordyceps mushrooms so they're known as enta mo pathogenic fungi fungi that kill insects and insects are on a constant dier dance between dinner and death as they go through soils and cordyceps is a source of cyclosporine moreover just recently the fda approved Novartis for a new anti ms drug called chill Enya which is predicted to be one of the ten most profitable commercially produced drugs in the history of medicine but cordyceps has a different face and the cordyceps is a mold has a mold stage and they're like two faces of the same organism these spores are very infectious to these insects and most insects have intimate pathogenic fungi that can harm them so they avoid them with great diligence but I did something different I took these cultures of the mold State and I morphed it in laboratory into a pre sporulating form and so insects avoid the spores but I discovered that if you took the mycelium without the spores something else happened which was truly amazing they became super attractants and they became super attractants to ants to termites and the surprising array of other types of insects and so the insects in this case an ant becomes mummified and then boying a course that's mushroom sprouts out of his head so it goes full circle now we did extracts again washing the mycelium and we were able to find that termites would stream directly to the location with the extracts replaced and three positive controls and the termites would tunnel specifically to where that location was well I started trying against other non social insects flies gnats mosquitoes and this is the baseline the flat graph there is the control and the only difference is we added the mycelium to the extract and we have not just attractants but I've discovered super attractants so when I tried it against mosquitoes and this is where we hit the big homerun we can attract mosquitoes roughly equivalent to a human hand with the extracts this has profound implications for disease control from malaria to yellow fever to West Nile virus and so what can we do there's lots that we can do I think we can now control disease vectors and zoonotic diseases carried by insects across land escapes and since so many insects and arthropods vector diseases most of you may not know that h5n1 bird flu is carried by house flies this is something that's not widely reported but because of climate change subtropical diseases are now entering into temperate zones so being able to control zoonotic pathogens I think is one Avenue that will have a positive impact and helping habitats and humans dwelling within those habitats moreover insects and arthropods now transmitted diseases that afflict humans but plants so the implications of this I think is absolutely enormous so we can increase the efficiency of bug zappers we can we can steer insect migrations across landscapes this is a paradigm shifting revolutionary breakthrough on the most fundamental of levels and moreover we can attract disease carrying bugs and blend them with expired antiviral drugs antimicrobial drugs or the crude precursors that made those drugs and we can create a panoply of a mixture of these drugs so the disease resistance would not occur we can distract the insects away from human populations away from animal populations away from plant populations or we can bring them to a locus and be able to control them most of you have heard that mosquito population on the East Coast was ten times greater this year than it was previously so another mushroom empowers the immune system and this is turkey tails and turkey kale mushrooms have also been used for more than a thousand years NIH funded our group with a 2.1 million dollar breast cancer clinical study which has been recently completed now this breast cancer clinical study was dealing with a non er non estrogen responsive breast cancer patients ladies and the study has come back with some remarkable results and when you patients have radiation therapy or chemotherapy their immune system is oftentimes impaired so natural killer cells are decreased taking these mushrooms as an adjunct therapy not as a substitute but to support the immune system the natural killer cells increase and our dose dependent basis the red bar is no treatment when three grams and six grams per day and then post radiation immune system depressed and then a dose-dependent basis the natural killer cells are enhanced over a period of four weeks so this raises bass immunity function which i think is critically important now this hit home to me very personally in June of 2009 when my 84 year old mother called me up and says Paul I have something very serious to talk to you about but you're always so busy it's a terrible thing for the here for mom I said mom what's wrong and she's a very happy genuine person she goes I'm worried and my mother's deeply religious has not seen a doctor since 1968 she said my right breast is five times the size of my left I have six swollen lymph glands the size of walnuts and her voice started shaking and I'm not ashamed to admit that I started crying why didn't you tell me sooner we spent a large part of June at the Swedish breast cancer clinic in Seattle the oncologists examined her and upon the second examination she had five point five centimeter diameter tumor it metastasized it went to her sternum I went to her liver see it's Stage four breast cancer the doctor gave her less than three months to live instead it was a second worst case of breast cancer she is seen as a doctor in 20 years of practice we had the circle family meeting many of you who gone through this my mom announced that she bought a pine casket the cheapest one that she could find because she was going to heaven but then the doctor said you know you're too old to have radiation therapy you can't have your breast removed but there's an interesting study on turkey tail mushrooms at Mystere Medical School you might want to try taking those and that's my buddy goes well my son supplying those so she was put on taxall and Herceptin wonderful drugs and she started taking eight turkey tail capsules a day four in the morning and four in the evening and that was in June of 2009 and today my mother has no detectable tumors and I'd like to bring you

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Views: 374,382

Rating: 4.9444141 out of 5

Keywords: Paul Stamets, TEDMED, TEDMED 2011, Mushrooms, Fungi, Fungi Perfecti, antimicrobial, insecticides, health, medicine, invention, innovation, imagination

Id: pXHDoROh2hA

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 21 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/Wiidiwi]

Saw this guy on joe rogans podcast a while back... I don't know if he's completely legit. He literally told a story about how he traveled into the future and knew a flood was going to happen before it did.