The Citizen Scientist

The power of fungi has been neglected by academic institutions and marginalized in the larger society. By the 1960s the American imagination had linked fungi to magic mushrooms, the counterculture movement, and Nixon’s war on drugs. That lingering association has meant that American mycophiles have gathered in community at the margins. We wanted to dig into those margins with William Padilla Brown, a citizen scientist who’s been thriving at them. William is the founder of Mycosymbiotics, and...