The Fungus

She was holding a specimen of agaricus bisporus, a species of fungus more commonly known as a “cultivated” mushroom. But it was no ordinary specimen. For one thing its pileus, or cap — which was resting against her left breast — was over a foot in diameter, and the stipe, or stalk was over two feet long and seven inches thick. Altogether it weighed nearly four pounds.

It differed in another more important way from an ordinary agaricus bisporus — this mushroom was protein rich, yielding almost as much usable protein per gram as poultry flesh.

It was the result of seven years hard work and research but at last she’d succeeded. Two hours ago the giant mushroom she was now hugging to her breast had been a tiny spore of almost microscopic size sitting in its tray of nutrient jelly. And now, just a short time later, it was big and protein rich enough to provide one person with enough food for a day.

Jane felt tears rolling down her face. No one had a right to be this happy, she told herself. “Oh baby, baby,” she whispered to the fungus, hugging it harder, “You are beautiful, and you’re mine . all mine.”

Then she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the glass wall that sealed off this section of the laboratory and felt momentarily embarrassed. “Hell, I look like the Madonna with Child,” she muttered to herself, “. positively downright beatific.”

It was time to stop acting like an emotional fool, she decided, and start behaving like a scientist again. The self-congratulations could come later. There was still work to do.

She took the mushroom to a nearby table and laid it out, almost reverently, in a large enamel tray. Then, with a scalpel, she cut a small section out from the edge of the cap. It wasn’t an easy thing for her to do — to mutilate her perfect creation in this way — but it had to be done.

She turned the section over in her hands and examined the gills on the underside of the cap. Her heart sank a little. The section was enlarged enough for her to see with the naked eye the hymenium covering the surface of the gills. The hymenium is the substance from which the basidium grow — the basidium being the micro-organisms that form the mushroom spores. An ordinary mushroom can eject spores at the rate of half a million a minute during the two or three days of its active life but Jane could see that the hymenium on this super-sized specimen was under-developed.

Nervously, she sliced a small sliver from the gill section and placed it under a microscope. Her heart sank still further. The microscope confirmed her fear. The hymenium was not forming any spore cells. She sighed and rested her chin on her hands. So her triumph was not yet 100 % successful. She, and her small team of assistants, had succeeded in creating a giant, fast-growing, protein rich mushroom but the genetically engineered organism that produced these traits obviously inhibited the mushroom’s reproductive cycle.

Originally Jane and her team had attempted to reach their goal by genetically altering the mushroom spore cell itself but nearly four years of effort produced no worthwhile results. Unraveling the genetic code of an organism even as simple as the agaricus bisporius fungus was a monumental task that Jane finally realized they lacked the resources to successfully accomplish. Unless she was given an extra 20people and unlimited funds — both of which she knew were out of the question — they might still be trying to crack the code in 10years’ time.

So Jane had decided to try another approach. Instead of trying to alter the whole organism genetically she instructed her assistants that from then on they would approach the problem from a different angle and concentrate on only one aspect of the mushroom’s metabolism. They would isolate the enzymes that helped to control the mushroom’s size, growth rate, and protein retention level, and then try and modify them accordingly.

Isolating the specific enzymes-and fortunately there were only two — took a further 12 months. Jane and her team then began to try and build an artificial enzyme that would supersede the functions of the two existing ones within the a. bisporus cells and accelerate the relevant processes at least a hundred-fold.

It had been a long and painstaking job recombining the DNA strands of the enzymes in an attempt to create the desired chemical structure that would in turn act like a super-catalyst within the mushroom. Enzymes, however, are extremely unstable; their crucial three-dimensional structures often falling apart in only a few hours.