Michael Beug ’66

October 4, 2025
Me in my orchard.

Twelve months ago, Ten Speed Press released my third book. Mushrooms of Cascadia: An Illustrated Key to the Fungi of the Pacific Northwest, Second Edition. It has made me a “mycological rock star” which feels strange indeed. My website, packed with educational materials is www.mushroomsofcascadia.com. My wife’s lung cancer (diagnosed May of 2022) is in remission, and her 20 years of debilitating pain is finally over thanks to medicinal mushrooms. Her doctors had turned her care over to me in November of 2022 after two different immunotherapy drugs had failed dramatically. What I accomplished for her just using fungi is unprecedented and is the framework for how I am now helping others. I continue active work with the North American Mycological Association (NAMA) on both the medicinal mushroom committee where my 2024 proposal to NAMA for the creation of a North American data base on medicinal/culinary mushrooms use is ready for beta testing and on the toxicology committee where I have been working this year with two colleagues on developing the first ever federal restaurant cooking guidelines for fungi. The restaurant guideline efforts were complete and had preliminary federal approval prior to the change in administration. I am also increasingly involved with two poison centers both consulting on poisonings and helping with new educational materials. Now I have two weeks for a final check of the questions and the start of coding for the medicinal/culinary mushroom database. Helping others with cancer, aging and mental health using fungi has become a major endeavor for me. At the beginning of 2025 I joined a broad coalition of reviewers for the Claudius project – a comprehensive guide to the fungi of Virginia. The pdf is now ready for final review – I have two weeks to make a final review of the document. I attended the 2025 HMC alumni gathering to interview the graduates of the HMC class of 1975 since they were my first students and I wanted to see how their lives had turned out. It was a thrill to meet with them and be back on campus. I stayed to speak at the Iris Critchell Celebration of Life. In mid-October of 2025 I will be at The Evergreen State College for the TESC alumni weekend since my environmental studies student John Calambokidis from the 1973-75 immersive 128 credit eight quarter long Ecology and Chemistry of Pollution program is receiving the Distinguished Alumni Award after continuing his undergraduate research on marine mammals and founding the Cascadia Research Collective. At the end of September 2025, another former student of mine, Paul Stamets, a mycology entrepreneur I still work closely with and founder of the company Fungi Perfecti, gave a fifteen-minute talk at the United Nations announcing that in a privately funded clinical trail of his Agarikon and Turkey tail mycelial products were highly effective in reducing side effects from Covid-19 and greatly increase the time Covid vaccinations are effective. He has also shown in vitro that the combination is effective against H5N1 bird flu. These and other Fungi Perfecti products are a significant part of my cancer success stories. I still live on and maintain our 32 acres in rural Washington State, grow food for the food bank, and am politically active fighting fascism with the pen, not the sword.

[post from Sept. 27, 2024]

Mushrooms of Cascadia: An Illustrated Key to the Fungi of the Pacific Northwest, Second Edition, Ten Speed Press was released September 24, 2024 and by October 18, it reached #1 on Amazon’s Hot New Releases “Our best-selling new and future releases”. It is a significant expansion of the first edition that was self-published in 2021 and has nearly 1100 photos with keys to roughly 3,000 species. It is designed for use by all skill levels of individuals interested in the kingdom of fungi. Roughly 90% of the photographs are by the author. It is available in over 20 countries

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