This story is featured in CityBeat’s Aug. 23 print edition.
Did you know that without fungi, there would be no alcohol in the world – nor a ton of other things essential to life on Earth?
Mycologist Nicholas Money likes to highlight the brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces) in the Fungi Kingdom as one of countless and relatable fun facets of fungi. An exhibition at the Lloyd Library & Museum, A Foray into Fungi, is currently featuring an in-depth exploration of fungi’s many applications to the world around us.
“There’s all sorts of ways in which fungi play this sort of hidden but really important role in our lives,” Money tells CityBeat. “All of the alcohol on Earth is produced by a single fungus, so that’s a yeast, the yeast Saccharomyces. And even if you don’t drink alcohol, it’s extremely important. I mean, it’s worth about a trillion dollars just to the U.S. economy every year.”
There’s also the pharmaceutical industry that benefits greatly from the world of fungi, Money says, and regional interests are aplenty, including one of Procter & Gamble’s most popular products. Head & Shoulders dandruff shampoo is actually an antifungal that stalls the growth of a fungus on the scalp that creates dandruff, Money explains.
The exhibition, which features rare books, imagery and fascinating fungi information and events runs through Nov. 18. A Foray into Fungi and its programming will take visitors through centuries of study — a lot of research that originated in Cincinnati — and connect fungi to cultural, culinary and medicinal uses via speakers, hikes and documentaries.
Money will present “The Fungus about Us: Our Lifelong Relationship with Yeasts, Molds, and Mushrooms,” on Sept. 6 from 7-8 p.m. at the Lloyd Library. (The event is currently sold out). He will lead a discussion concerning how human immune systems engage constantly with “the teeming mycobiome inside the body” and how it protects our health. Money will also explore the hot topic of experimental fungi uses in the clinical treatment of depression and anxiety. Psilocybin, which is produced by a few hundred species of mushrooms, has been under the scope as possibly more than a recreational drug relating to the controversial topic, he says.
Even considering the variety of facts and ways that fungi facilitate life on Earth, what excites Money most about the fungus subject are the “unknowns,” he says. While he’s invested a considerable amount of his life researching and writing books on the subject, the answers to-be are what pique his continued interest.
“It’s all the unanswered questions in fungal biology, that, despite a couple of 100 years of experimental studies on fungi, there’s still a lot that we don’t know about this incredible kingdom of organisms,” Money tells CityBeat. “If you think about that general question about how different chunks of biology work, there’s a lot of questions about fungi that are fundamental things about how they conduct their lives that deserve our attention and keep me interested.”
The Lloyd Library & Museum’s Executive Director Patricia Van Skaik seconds the “unknown” notion, noting how fungus is still incredibly mysterious to humans. It wasn’t until 1969, Van Skaik tells CityBeat, that fungi was classified under its own kingdom, before then it was considered to belong to the Plant Kingdom. Van Skaik says she enjoys the juxtaposition of dangerous versus safe fungi and the plethora of informative books on the subject.
“One of the themes that you see running throughout any discussion of mushrooms to the present day is that they can be extremely helpful,” Van Skaik says. “And they also can be extremely dangerous.”
An impressive display of rare books is on view at the Lloyd Library & Museum as part of A Foray into Fungi, including the first-ever book devoted to mushrooms by Franciscus van Sterbeeck called Theatrum Fungorum, published in 1675.
A visit to the Lloyd Library will reveal Cincinnati’s integral role in mycological research, which began with one of the library’s founders, Curtis Gates Lloyd, who sent for fungal specimens on a global scale and amassed the largest collection of dried specimens in the world in the early 1900s.
A postdoctoral fellow at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago and current Curtis Gates Lloyd Fellow, Brad Bolman, is researching the Curtis Gates Lloyd Papers to inform his upcoming book about the transnational history of mycology (The History of Transnational Mycology).
Atop Bolman’s desk at the library is a box of letters penned by Lloyd and sent to people around the world, asking for fungus. “There are 30 or so of these boxes,” Bolman says as he tells CityBeat about Lloyd as a book collector, self-taught mycologist and open critic of others in the field. The voluminous collection includes notes and mycological findings among correspondence about fungus from around the world.
“One of the reasons that Lloyd is such an interesting figure historically, is that despite being located in Cincinnati, which we don’t think of as being necessarily transnational, he maintained this really extensive correspondence with researchers all around the world,” Bolman says. “And it was in part because he was self-taught. Part of what he wanted to do was build the biggest dried fungus collection that existed at the time. So he would send letters to people in Japan, to people in China, the Philippines, Africa, et cetera, saying, you know, ‘I don’t care who you are, I don’t care if you’re an expert or just a regular person, but when you go outside, or if you go on a hike send me whatever you find. Just dry it, put it in a box and ship it to Cincinnati.’ Nobody else was doing anything like that.”
Bolman says a lot of why American mycologists are so prominent now is because of Lloyd’s early efforts and research. The Lloyd Library & Museum is treasured for its archival materials on subjects such as botany, pharmacy, natural history, medicine, scientific history and visual arts — the last topic being an unexpected point of interest throughout A Foray into Fungi.
Visual arts are pertinent to the fungus subject because when research began, photography didn’t exist. Scientists would often have to also be artists, or employ an artist to render exact images of specimens for identification and documentation. A lot of this work turned into not only practical art but works of beauty and displays of talent like in the book Illustrations of the Fungi of Our Fields and Woods by Sarah Price, which is on view at the library.
Programming following Money’s discussion on Sept. 7, is a virtual event called “Cooking with Mushrooms” on Sept. 27 from 7-9 p.m. More in-person and virtual events are listed on the Lloyd Library and Museum’s website and will occur throughout the remainder of the exhibition.
A Foray into Fungi runs through Nov. 18 at the Lloyd Library & Museum. Info: lloydlibrary.org.
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This article appears in Aug 9-22, 2023.
