LUKE GROSKIN: The lowly mushroom, a primordial growth
sprouting from decay, perhaps a tiny morsel
or a deadly distraction.
But look deeper.
We may find the humble fungus has much to provide.
PHILIP ROSS: As a designer and a thinker about form and space,
they're fascinating.
You can witness a living fractal and how
it behaves to the environment.
They can take our greatest resource, which is human waste,
and turn that into something that's really valuable for us.
They have the ability to give us everything that we want.
LUKE GROSKIN: This is Philip Ross,
and he's the Chief Technology Officer of the San Francisco
based startup MycoWorks, a company seeking to harness
the powers of fungus.
PHILIP ROSS: It can go on to replace
so many aspects of our generated world
right now that we extract from things
that can't be regenerated.
LUKE GROSKIN: Things that seem obvious upon reflection.
PHILIP ROSS: So this strange background
behind me is actually the hide or the skin of a type
of mushroom, Ganoderma lucidum.
This is a traditional type of fungus
that has been used in medicine in Asia
for millennia that we grew at MycoWorks,
and this behaves a lot like animal skin.
So this is really the starting point
is imagining it as leather.
This takes two weeks.
It's crazy.
Mushrooms grow at an exponential rate,
so it's more how fast can we keep up with the organism.
LUKE GROSKIN: By comparison, a piece of cowhide the same size
takes two years to grow.
PHILIP ROSS: And that takes a lot of resources
and a lot of food and a lot of time
to create that animal for our use.
Our materials start off as agricultural waste, corn cobs,
hemp hurds, paper pulp waste, rice hulls, sawdust.
So all these bags of white stuff behind me
that's the mushroom that is eating the sawdust.
This is the last bit of sawdust and you
can see the encroaching network of cells that
are all coming around that.
LUKE GROSKIN: These cells are known as mycelium.
PHILIP ROSS: Mushroom mycelium is the root-like fibers
that grow underground that are part of a mushroom.
LUKE GROSKIN: It's out of these colonies of mycelium
that specialized tissues can bloom.
PHILIP ROSS: In this thing, has the diversity of types
of materials that you ultimately can create things that
look like they're enameled, that look like insect skin,
and things that are very hard, things
that are kind of soft and leathery, things
that are porous, and all these really different expressions
of the organism are all part of the same thing.
LUKE GROSKIN: And by manipulating various conditions
you can transform mycelium from its basic state.
PHILIP ROSS: We give the mushroom types of food
that it might like or dislike.
And then the other things we do is manipulate
its immediate environment, its temperature, the humidity
levels, the amount of light, and then the exchange of gas.
And that's it.
LUKE GROSKIN: It's a low tech solution
for creating what MycoWorks believes
to be a more than perfect leather substitute.
PHILIP ROSS: For the consumer, it's
going to have benefits that will be unlike other things
that you're going to have patterns and colors that would
be impossible with actual animal hides and qualities that
can be grown directly into it.
So we can grow fasteners directly into ours,
we don't have to use glue necessarily, or even seaming.
It is breathable, similar to animal leather.
It's water wicking, and it's naturally antibiotic.
This is without any chemistry added into it at all.
LUKE GROSKIN: They've already created
some stylish prototypes, but they're still
testing various aspects of its production.
PHILIP ROSS: We've only been working
with this material for about three months,
and so we started first to test it for tensile strength.
In that time period, we've taken it
from being as strong or stronger than lamb, sheep, and synthetic
leather, and now we actually have it as strong as deerskin.
LUKE GROSKIN: And while they're touting its strength,
MycoWorks has no plans to stop at leather.
PHILIP ROSS: Another thing that these types of mushrooms
here can make are kind of synthetic woods.
So it's really hard.
This thing that started off as waste sawdust
is able to crush a metal object.
LUKE GROSKIN: How about furniture?
PHILIP ROSS: This chair that I'm sitting in, the walnut
legs are from salvaged wood.
And then we took sawdust and then
we transformed that with a local version of this mushroom
to grow this chair.
LUKE GROSKIN: To Philip Ross, the possibilities are endless.
PHILIP ROSS: My hope is that this
will become a globalized industry
that well beyond my lifetime or even what MycoWorks is setting
up that this will just become a standard way that human beings
are going to figure out how to provide for themselves.
Eventually you will be growing your solar panels
and telephones and other types of things
like that at a fungus based substrate.
To me, that is why I keep on pursuing them.
I have witnessed it, and I know it as a truth.
So I'm following that truth.
LUKE GROSKIN: But in the meantime.
PHILIP ROSS: We welcome all the vegan biker gangs
to come and find us.
LUKE GROSKIN: For Science Friday, I'm Luke Groskin.