Paul Stamets—Michael Beug

Paul Stamets and Michael Beug’s relationship joined a young mycological enthusiast to a professor trained in environmental chemistry, and helped turn shared curiosity into a program of research on Psilocybe mushrooms. At Evergreen State College mycology campus in the mid-1970s, Beug took Stamets and two other students under his wing. They learned the subject together, investigating a genus that much of the scientific field preferred to leave alone. The partnership’s importance lay not only in what the group discovered, but in how a teacher’s willingness to support an unconventional subject gave Stamets the foundation for a career in mycology.

A partnership formed at Evergreen State College

Stamets’s mycological education did not come from Kenyon College, which he left after a year. It took shape at Evergreen State College mycology campus in Olympia, Washington, then a new experimental college where students could devise independent courses of study. Beug, a young professor with a degree in environmental chemistry rather than formal training as a mycologist, agreed to guide Stamets and two similarly absorbed students, Jeremy Bigwood and Jonathan Ott. The relationship was collaborative as well as instructional: Beug did not arrive as an established specialist imparting a settled body of knowledge, but joined the students in mastering a field that all four were learning.

The group’s work was enabled by practical resources. They used an electron microscope, and Beug had secured a research license that allowed their investigations to proceed. Their focus was Psilocybe, a genus then surrounded by legal and scientific reticence. Psilocybin mushrooms had been illegal since 1970 and were chiefly known to the counterculture as a natural alternative to LSD. Researchers knew little about their habitats, distribution, life cycles, or potency. In the United States, mushrooms were generally imported from Latin America or cultivated from spores of Latin American species, especially cubensis. The group’s decision to study the fungi close at hand helped redirect attention toward an understudied subject.

Research and a shift in attention

Working together, the Evergreen group identified and published three new Psilocybin mushroom species, developed methods to grow them indoors, and devised ways to measure Psilocin and Psilocybin levels. These were distinct contributions: describing new species expanded the known range of the genus, cultivation techniques made the mushrooms more accessible to systematic study, and chemical measurement offered a way to compare their potency. Beug’s role in a team that included students was significant precisely because expertise was built through shared investigation rather than inherited from a mature research tradition.

The group also changed where people looked. The prevailing understanding placed psychedelic mushrooms chiefly in southern Mexico, associated with R. Gordon Wasson’s 1955 encounter with them. The Evergreen researchers were finding new species around them in the Pacific Northwest and publishing those findings. As interest shifted from southern Mexico to the Northwest, mushroom seekers began searching local fields and lawns, often bent over to examine the ground in what Stamets called the psilocybin stoop. Stamets’s rapid rise as a leading expert on Psilocybe followed this period of collective work; in 1978, at age twenty-three, he published his first book, Psilocybe Mushrooms and Their Allies. The book’s title expressed his developing view that humans, as animals that spread the fungi’s genes, might also serve as their allies.

Beug’s later answer about Psilocybin

Years after the Evergreen collaboration, Beug re-entered the story through a question about why mushrooms produce Psilocybin. The book’s narrator contacted him at home in the Columbia River Gorge, about 160 miles upriver from a campsite where the question had arisen. Beug had retired from teaching and had not recently spent much time thinking about Psilocybe, but he was interested in the problem. This exchange documents a later intellectual connection between former professor and student, rather than a claim that they remained engaged in a continuous formal research project.

The question was whether Psilocybin might defend the mushroom against pests or disease. Many plant secondary metabolites serve defensive purposes, and toxins can alter an animal’s behavior as well as harm it. Beug challenged this explanation by drawing on his experience testing fungal chemistry. He had found only minute quantities of Psilocybin and Psilocin in mycelium, the part of the organism most likely to need protection. The compounds instead appeared in the fruiting bodies, sometimes at more than two percent of dry weight. Their concentration in that part of the fungus made a simple defensive function seem less persuasive.

Beug offered a different possibility, explicitly as his best guess rather than an established conclusion. Psilocybin might have begun as an accidental by-product of metabolism, yet persisted through evolution because it benefited the mushroom: fungi producing more of it may have been eaten more often, allowing their spores to travel farther. He pointed to reports of horses, cattle, dogs, and several kinds of primates eating psychedelic mushrooms. Some animals, such as cows, appeared unaffected; other reports described horses behaving unusually and dogs that sought out Psilocybe mushrooms and seemed to hallucinate. In this account, the animals that consumed the fungi could become agents in their dispersal, and higher-Psilocybin strains might thereby become more widespread. The proposal connected Beug’s chemical knowledge to the ecological question the Evergreen researchers had helped make visible, while remaining a hypothesis rather than a demonstrated explanation.

The relationship’s significance

Beug’s influence on Stamets is most clearly established through the training and joint work at Evergreen: he took the students under his guidance, helped provide research tools, and participated in their effort to understand a neglected genus. The later phone conversation shows that their intellectual connection remained available years afterward. Beug did not simply confirm Stamets’s emerging ideas about mushrooms; in the discussion of Psilocybin, he tested a popular defensive explanation against the location and quantity of the compounds, then proposed a distinct evolutionary possibility.

Their relationship therefore connects two scales of the book’s account. At the local scale, a professor and students built mycological knowledge together, producing new species descriptions, cultivation methods, and chemical measurements. At the wider scale, that work shifted attention toward the Pacific Northwest and helped establish the context in which Stamets became a leading voice on Psilocybe. Beug’s later reasoning extended the partnership’s scientific character: curiosity was shared, explanations remained open to challenge, and a plausible account of the mushroom’s chemistry was treated as a question to investigate rather than a settled fact.