Roots and Culture

DJ Press & DJ Slide

The Last of Us has made me think about the capacity for fungi to cause disease and the potential for our impact on the planet to reap consequences of the microbial variety. Hopefully from this segment, you can go around ‘um actually-ing’ your colleagues that “The last of us zombie mushroom is…um, actually… based on the fungal genus Ophiocordiceps, not Cordyceps.” Maybe you’ve also learned that fungi like Candida albicans and Aspergillus fumigatus are already pretty well-adapted to infect humans as opportunistic pathogens given the right immuno-suppressed conditions. To be clear, they are usually not pathogens though! Also, hopefully you have a new metaphor in your back pocket; the red queen: “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Genre

Public Affairs

Missed the Show?

MP3 320kbps, broadband