Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines: Our Lifelong Relationship with Fungi
Nicholas Money
Sunday, 6 April 2025
12:00pm
1 hour
Oxford Martin School: Seminar Room
£8 - £15
Biologist Professor Nicholas Money says we are navigating a world with fungi and explains how they operate in our bodies, how we interact with them in the wider environment and their vital role in supporting life and treating disease.
Money says our immune system is constantly interacting with fungi in our bodies and that we can suffer serious or life-threatening illness if that peaceful co-existence is disturbed. And he looks at our relationship with fungi outside the body, from wild mushrooms and cultivated moulds that have long been part of our diet to the experimentation with magic mushrooms in the treatment of depression.
Money is professor of biology at Miami University in Ohio. His previous books include The Rise of Yeast: How the Sugar Fungus Shaped Civilization, Mushrooms: A Natural and Cultural History and Microbiology: A Very Short Introduction.
Part of the festival’s programme of American literature and culture.