The Mushroom Problem
by Phil Ross

April 22, 2026

The Thing Itself

Blind monks examining an elephant, Katsushika Hokusai, from Hokusai Manga, c. 1817

There is a type of shelf fungus that grows on the sides of trees, with earthy colors and a lacquered-looking skin, accumulating identities it can’t reconcile. Ecologists know it as an organism that decays dead trees. Clinical scientists know it as a pharmacological subject that generates valuable medicines. Traditional Chinese and Japanese medicine have cultivated it for health applications for over two thousand years. The materials industry grows it under controlled conditions for leather-like sheets and structural panels. And the scientists who classify living things have mis-sorted its many regional varieties into an elaborate tangle, such that a researcher studying specimens from California, Japan, and central Africa may be working with organisms that are, genetically, quite distinct from one another, even if the label on the jar says the same thing.

That label, in Latin, is Ganoderma. And the fact that Ganoderma means something different depending on who’s in the room illustrates the larger mushroom problem.

That an organism can hold so many meanings at once is less a quirk of one fungus than a symptom of the larger kingdom in which it belongs. Fungi are barely known within formal scientific descriptions even as they discretely contribute to our wealth and well-being, with fewer than ten percent of their millions yet described. Fungi make agriculture possible from below, moving carbon and minerals through soil and between trees before any seed is planted in the ground. The cultures that ferment our food predate written language; the pharmaceutical breakthroughs that gave us penicillin and cyclosporin came from molds. And now, clinical trials for fungi to cure mental health disorders. Our curiosity has been organized, from the beginning, into rooms that do not easily communicate. Those rooms have names: medicinal mycology, agricultural science, forest ecology, industrial biotechnology, ethnomycology… on and on with the rooms. Each rigorous within its walls, but with few shared doors.

A Kingdom in Babel

The Tower of Babel, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1563

Mycology developed rigorous standards within its disciplines. What never got built was the connection between those standards and the application domains that claimed the organism. Each domain developed its own vocabulary, its own measures, its own protocols — rigorous within their walls, but without reference to each other or to the underlying science they were all drawing from. The dictionary that would let them speak to one another was never written, and translation has no center to hold.

The result is something like the Library of Babel that Jorge Luis Borges imagined — a collection of all possible knowledge, made difficult to navigate from outside any single room, where each volume is written in a language the others don’t share. Ask five fungal researchers to describe the same organism and you will receive five partially incompatible answers, each accurate within its own context, but possibly unintelligible to the others. The word “growth” means one thing to a pathologist, another to an ecologist, another to an engineer. “Maturation” is not a shared concept. Even the question of what constitutes a species is hotly contested, and is answered by the frame of reference: a microscope, a DNA sequencer, or a century of agricultural practice.

The commercial explosion of applied mycology over the past decade has forced these worlds into active collision, and the cost of not being able to read each other is now legible in dollars and years. Mycomaterials companies have spent tens of millions rediscovering fungal behaviors that agricultural mycologists documented decades ago, because nobody bridged those literatures. The pattern goes deeper. Researchers developing psilocybin-assisted therapies navigate clinical frameworks in near-complete isolation from ecologists who hold crucial context about how these fungi vary across populations and habitats — variation that is not a footnote but a variable. Agricultural companies discover at production scale the limits of substrate biology that plant scientists could have anticipated at the bench.

The bridges that do exist were built by individuals whose unusual career trajectories happened to span the gaps. They are people, not systems; and when they move on, the bridges tend to go with them.

This is not a problem unique to mycology. Each time measurement reaches a new scale — the microscope after the naked eye, the genome after the microscope — the classifications built at the previous resolution stop being adequate to the new one. The silos in mycology hardened around what the microscope could see and sort. Molecular tools arrived in the early 1990s and opened a scale the microscope couldn’t reach. Genomic work can track entire population dynamics, or measure gene frequency across communities. The rooms were named just as the walls started becoming permeable.

Open Fung Doing

From: Growing a circular economy with fungal biotechnology. Meyer et al., Fungal Biology and Biotechnology
(2020)

We founded Open Fung because we kept running into the same wall from different directions. The wall is the same in every direction: lack of shared language, not clear on common infrastructure, sparse translation layers between what each domain knows. Our team brings together synthetic biology, forest pathology, mycomaterials engineering, and arts and cultural practices, not as a calculated diversity of credentials, but because the problem genuinely required all of those entry points before it became fully realized. What we have come to call “the mushroom problem” only reveals its full shape when you approach it from enough angles simultaneously. A refractive approach — each entry point illuminating a different surface of the same problem. Any single vantage point looks like someone else’s problem.

We want to know what the field would look like if designed from scratch, today, with tools and values we actually have. Not layered on top of existing siloed infrastructure, but rethought from first principles and best practices. Built the way the kingdom itself builds things, through lateral connection, adapting to resources, and with distributed intelligence rather than vertical hierarchy and proprietary enclosures.

What the field needs is the intra/infra/superstructure to connect the research it already has. Common standards and ethical guidelines for collection and use, a connective tissue that makes what each community knows more easily interpretable by others. What each domain has learned about Ganoderma holds sound within its own walls. The missing piece is the translation layer: measurement frameworks that travel across disciplines, protocols that replicate across contexts, designed to begin with the organism and the people who work with it. Ganofornia is where that work is currently underway.

Sawdust at Far West Fungi, California. Feedstock for organic shiitake production

Ganofornia Dreaming

Ganofornia brings our search for a local fungal utility into the focus of a single question: how does an unaffiliated group go ahead and develop a California mushroom strain adapted to consuming our primary agricultural waste streams?

Ganofornia integrates field collection, high-throughput laboratory testing, genome sequencing, and predictive growth modeling, all conducted under an ethical framework developed in active consultation with Indigenous communities, legal advisors, and mycologists from multiple disciplines. Every protocol, every strain, every dataset is designed from the outset to be publicly shared. The goal is not to produce proprietary knowledge about one California fungus. It is to produce a replicable template: a demonstration that any community, anywhere, can apply to bring their own regional fungi from wild collection to open, functional use. Someone working with Ganoderma in the forests of Oaxaca, or the mountains of Yunnan, or the woodlands of the Dolomites, should be able to use what we build here as a starting point rather than beginning from a blank page.

Ganoderma, Los Angeles. Collected during Ganofornia field survey. Photo by Courtney Fink

The project is underway, not complete. We are building most of this as we go. When we searched for an established process for how to collect responsibly, one that could integrate Indigenous bio-sovereignty, environmental law, biodiversity treaties, and equitable benefit-sharing, the framework we needed didn’t exist. The pieces were there, in legal documents, academic papers, conversations with knowledge holders, but nobody had put them together. We are assembling it. We will share it.

The early findings are instructive in ways we couldn’t have anticipated. When we began searching for the specific California Ganoderma variety our testing identified as the strongest performer for mycomaterials, the published record suggested it was not widely established in the state. iNaturalist, where anyone can photograph and submit a species sighting, told another story: 139 visual observations, plus eleven records confirmed by DNA analysis, concentrated in Southern California. We found abundant specimens growing on ornamental trees along sidewalks in Los Angeles and other dense metropolitan locations. The knowledge we wanted already existed, distributed across a public database, a network of amateur naturalists, and the tree canopy of a major American city. It had never been screened by a materials researcher and a field mycologist at the same time. iNaturalist answered a question the closed silos hadn’t yet learned to ask.

The laboratory has been equally revealing. Testing multiple strains showed that varieties of what the industry loosely calls “Ganoderma” produce dramatically divergent material properties: different densities, different structural behaviors, unpredictable responses to substrate composition. A Gano is not a Gano is not a Gano. No specialist in any single domain would find this surprising. Each already knew their piece. The blindspot is that none of them could see the others’.

Sequence alignment across Ganofornia strains. A Gano is not a Gano is not a Gano

Late arrival

Fungi (Funga!) received a distinct Kingdom separate from plants in 1969, and had to be reorganized appropriately. The molecular tools that have allowed researchers to distinguish thousands of cryptic species — tiny threads of cells that look identical to the naked eye but are genetically as different as a sparrow and a shark — are products of the past three and a half decades of genetic and genomic characterization. Mycology is still being founded. The basic ontology of the kingdom, what things are, what they are called, how they relate to one another, is still being written.

The field hasn’t had time to develop the architecture that mature sciences take for granted. The people arriving now didn’t wait. Self-educated mycologists are showing up with universal computational fluency, digital natives with sequencing tools that once required a full laboratory budget, and the habits of open-source culture: share methods, replicate experiments, build in public. They are, in this sense, a return of the polymath practitioners who built the field before its institutional capture — arriving now equipped with tools those predecessors couldn’t have imagined.

The gatekeeping structures that once kept the field inside universities and government labs still exist, but they have lowered enough that it is now open to practitioners unfamiliar to the previous generation’s institutions. Someone running cultivation experiments in a converted garage is doing biology. A designer who has taught herself genetics because she needed to is doing science. Indigenous knowledge holders whose relationships with fungi span generations hold expertise that no graduate program can certify and no database can replace. Community scientists are uploading observations and DNA sequences from places no academic field station has ever reached. The tools they carry don’t recognize the old room boundaries as load-bearing. Metagenomics, gene editing, population dynamics — these operate below the level of kingdom and species, at resolutions the classification systems that built the silos were never designed to reach. The new practitioners aren’t ignoring the old ontology. They’re working in a space it doesn’t fully describe.

Mycology is open to weirdos. This is not a small thing. It means that the knowledge structures we build now will include these contributors or exclude them, and that choice will determine the shape of the field for generations. A commons built on open standards, shared protocols, and ethical frameworks for participation is not just a more efficient way to do science. It is a different kind of science: one where the definition of the kingdom is worked out collectively, in real time, by the full constituency who have something genuine to contribute to it.

Ganofornia strain testing, Open Fung

The Window Is Open

Why hasn’t this been solved already? Until recently, the pieces weren’t in place. The digitization of scientific practice — sequencing, imaging, data sharing, remote collaboration — has advanced to the point that a small team can now do work that once required an institution, and circulate it in ways that once required a fancy publisher. The community of practitioners has grown strange and large in the best sense: mycology’s lateness as a formal discipline means it has no established gatekeeping culture to defend. The field is, at this moment, porous.

What remains missing to answer the mushroom problem is not talent or tools or even will. It is the connective layer, the common standards and open protocols, that would allow work being done in thousands of separate contexts to assemble into something more valuable across all of them. That is the vision Ganofornia is designed to address, and the reason we feel urgency with the experiment.

Every expansion into a new scale of information passes through this interval — the printing press, the microscope, the genome. The existing structures can’t hold the new complexity. The map loses its authority before the new one forms. What gets built in that interval determines the shape of the field for a generation. We are in that interval now. The hypothesis Ganofornia tests is simple: that a single organism, fully characterized and openly documented across domains, can serve as proof that the translation layer can be built. The window for building a global commons on a foundation of living biological knowledge is not indefinitely open.

OPEN FUNG

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